IN THE VIRGINIAS 



WAITMAIi BARBS 



I 




Glass. 
Book. 



E Waitman barbe, 

ASHES AND INCENSE: 
POEMS, $1.25 



In Mr. Waitman Barbe's volume of verse, "Ashes and Incense," 
we note a true singing capacity, and an unlaboured strain like that 
song of the thrush of which the poet sings in "An Old Love-Song." — 
Saturday Review, London, England. 

There is real poetry in the book — a voice worth owning and exercis- 
ing. I am struck with the beauty and feeling of the lyrics which I have 
read— such, for example, as the stanzas on Lanier and "The Comrade 
Hills." — Edmund Clarence Stedman. 

All the way through his poems we feel flashes of thrilling inspiration. 
— The Indepejident. 

A spirit of pure singing inspires these verses. — New York Christian 
Advocate. 

"Ashes and Incense" suggests a pyre and fragrance such as might 
be made of old love-letters. Beauty is the true poet's theme, and beau- 
tiful are the flowers of thought plucked from this garden of song. — The 
Public Ledger, Philadelphia. 

Mr. Waitman Barbe is distinctly a poet. His calling ;is sure and his 
admission to the circle of the elect of the troubadours of .to-day is cer- 
tain. — Commercial- Gazette, Cincinnati. 

Like the voice of one crying in the wilderness, this true poet protests 
against pessimism, against modern philistinisrn, and against the soul 
starvation which attends upon our plutocratic age. His song is alive 
with the warm enthusiasm and love of beauty of the youthful free-singer. 
— The Republic, St. Louis. 

A clear, cultured voice, whether it be mighty in volume or simply 
sweet in tone. — The Transcript, Portland. 

There is a strength, a beauty, an originality in his singing that are 
exceedingly pleasing, and at times a depth of thought that is poetically 
expressed in a style of rare excellence. — The Home Journal, Boston. 

IN THE VIRGINIAS, $1.00. 



In the Virginias 



STORIES AND 
SKETCHES,^ 



♦ 



By WAITMAN BARBED 
Author of "Ashes and Incense" 



•r 



Illustrations by & 
JOHN RETTIG 



MANUFACTURED BY 

The Werner Company 

Akron, Ohio 

J896 






Copyright, 1896, by A. E. Kenney. 



In BUchange 
fktmv And Navy Club 
Of WasliingtoB IXC 

Jan. 14 K' 



TO 

Clara Louise 



Tales in this Book. 



PAGE 

In the Virginias 9 

The Preacher of the Three Churches . . 39 

The King's Daughter 62 

The Sketch Club Banquet 73 

The Gypsy Trail 79 

A Literary Atmosphere 88 

His Last Campaign 108 

A Tale of Fourth Street 124 

Story of an Oil Strike 133 

A Maiden of the Hills 145 

The Artist's Story 147 

In the Rue Royale 156 

Martha 162 

The Companions e 173 

Hafed Ben Hafed 175 



(vii) 



IN THE VIRGINIAS 



THERE died a few years ago, in one 
of the extreme eastern counties of 
West Virginia, a gentleman whom I 
shall call, for the purposes of this tale, 
Henry Fairfax. 

I am sure he would have been pleas- 
ed with the name Fairfax himself, be- 
cause of its intimate association with 
so many things Virginian. His home 
was but a short distance from the site 
of Lord Thomas Fairfax's historic 
"Greenway Court," where the haughty 
old English lord had his horses and 
his hounds and the finest estates in 
Virginia; and, like that old Lord Fair- 
fax, Baron of Cameron, he, too, lived 
to a great age, as proud as Lucifer and 
the soul of all things honorable. And 
so I have called him a Fairfax. 

During his lifetime Henry Fairfax 

[9] 



IO IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

was a resident of two states, although he 
had never moved from the old home 
bearing the proud name of Fairfax 
Hall, where he was born, and where his 
father before him had lived and died. 

When the sword of civil strife 
dropped in '63 along the Blue Ridge 
and severed the fair old state in twain, 
Fairfax Hall fell on the western side. 
This was the bitterest blow of its 
owner's life, and he would never per- 
mit any one in his presence to refer to 
the fact that he no longer lived in the 
Old Dominion. During the quarter 
of a century of his enforced residence 
in the new state, he never admitted 
that he was a citizen of West Virginia 
to anybody except the tax collector. 
He continued to head his letters "Fair- 
fax Hall, Virginia," and when he went 
down to the National Capital, his name 
always appeared on the register of the 
National Hotel as "Henry Fairfax of 
Virginia." 

His wife died many years ago, long 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



II 



before I knew him, and he lived with 
his granddaughter, Virginia, a lovely 
and beautiful girl, who was the pride 
and consolation of his old age. The 
name her mother had given her was 
Mary, but her mother having died and 
her father having gone to the bad and 
to the West about the same time, the 
old man took the child and changed 
her name to Virginia. He said that in 
his opinion every girl baby born in 
Virginia should be called Virginia, and 
he once cut the acquaintance of an old 
friend who had named his daughter 
Rhody (an abbreviation, as the old man 
argued, of 
Rhode Island) 
when he had 
asked him per- 
sonally to call 
her Virginia. 

Fairfax Hall 
was a roomy, rambling old house with 
generous chimneys and wide porticos, 
and about it were the fertile fields of the 




12 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

upper Shenandoah and not far away the 
glassy Potomac. Many a distinguished 
personage had sampled the famous 
mint julep of Fairfax Hall. At least 
four "Presidents had enjoyed the hospi- 
tality of the place, besides senators 
and distinguished authors, artists and 
diplomats. Henry Fairfax, in his 
younger days, had been Speaker of 
the Virginia House for several terms, 
and had served as consul at an important 
European port. He was a gentleman of 
liberal education, and, if he had been 
financially able, would have been a 
patron of literature and the arts. On 
the walls were portraits by Gilbert 
Stuart and Peale, and in the place of 
honor, in the wide hall, stood a cane 
which was originally the walking stick 
of the old lord of Greenway Court. 

In a bundle of old letters which 
have come down as an heirloom, I find 
frequent references to the gay times at 
Fairfax Hall when the young people 
gathered there from Winchester and 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. jo 

all the upper Valley, and parties often 
from Washington and Baltimore. 
Those were the days of the old regime 
when the world took time to be hos- 
pitable and happy. These old brown 
and yellow letters tell how the daughter 
of a President danced with the young 
master of the Hall, and how he kissed 
her hand with something more than 
gallant courtesy. They hint, too, of a 
moonlight affair out on the banks of 
the Potomac between this same young 
scion of the House of Fairfax and a 
young French army officer about this 
same daughter of a President. 

They tell of a visit of some weeks at 
Fairfax Hall from Napoleon's Director 
of the Treasury, who had negotiated 
the sale of the Territory of Louisiana 
to the United States government — the 
Marquis Francois de Barb6-Marbois — 
and who had become so much pleased 
with this country that he spent much 
of the remainder of his life here. 

Yes, that was a gay and delightful 



IA IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

chapter in the history of the social life 
of the old "Northern Neck" of Vir- 
ginia, but at the time of the events 
about to be related, all of these things 
were but a tradition and a memory. 

The old family portraits were still 
on the walls, and now and then the 
hounds followed a red fox across the 
hills and far away towards Mt. Jackson, 
but the gay parties and the merry 
making at Fairfax Hall all belonged to 
the days before Sheridan went down 
into the Valley. The wide estate had 
gone piece by piece to make small but 
thrifty farms, until the biggest things 
about the Hall were its name and its 
memories. 

Henry Fairfax had lost the keenness 
of some of his faculties, as well as most 
of his estate, and there were those who 
called him childish, but he retained his 
great love for his granddaughter (whom 
he always called his daughter) and for 
the old state of which he thought he 
was still a citizen. 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



J 5 



"Daughter, I am going down to the 
capital to-day to watch the proceedings 
of the legislature for a few days," and 
he kissed her good-bye and set off for 
Richmond on the James instead of 
Charleston on the Kanawha, for Rich- 
mond was still to him the capital of 
his state. 

Frequently he would inquire of vis- 
itors from counties farther west about 
the coal and the timber and the crops 
"over in West Virginia." Virginia 
humored his every wish, and loved the 
kind hearted old man as much as he 
loved her. 

One day, sitting on the broad old 
front portico where his ancestors and 
their distinguished guests had sat and 
smoked and talked European and 
American politics, he called Virginia 
to his side, and, after silently stroking 
her soft chestnut hair for a long time 
and looking vacantly out towards the 
Potomac and the blue hills beyond, he 
said: 



1 6 i\' THE VIRGINIAS. 

"Daughter." 
"Yes, father." 

"Daughter, how long is it that your 
mother has been dead?" 

"Twenty years." 

"And how old are you?" 

"Why, you know, father, don't you?" 

"No, I cannot remember." 

"You have often told me that I was 
only a year old when my mother died." 

"You are then just the age your 
mother was when she was married to 
that" 

The old man did not finish the sen- 
tence, but got up and walked back and 
forth on the veranda, leaning on the 
arm of Virginia. His hair was long 
and thin and white, his smooth-shaven 
face was furrowed and brown like a 
winter hillside, and his voice was as 
thin as the thread of life that bound 
him to Fairfax Hall, but he was re- 
markably erect, and, like all of his race, 
he was tall and muscular. 

After another long silence, broken 



IN THE VIRGINIAS, 



*7 



only by the steady stroke of his cane 
on the old oak floor, he continued: 

"Daughter, since the day when I 
buried your mother out yonder on the 
hill by the side of her mother, I have 
had only you to live for." 

"And have I not been kind and good 
to you?" 

The old man bent down and kissed 
her lips. No other answer was needed. 

Again he was silent; so long, this 
time, that Virginia said: 

"Father, I am sure there is some- 
thingyou want to tell me. What is it?" 

He sat down in the big old chair, 
with Virginia at his feet, and continu- 
ing to stroke her hair, he said: 

"Your father, if still alive, is some- 
where in the far West. I hope he will 
never return; he will not dare. I was 
always opposed to your mother's mar- 
rying him. He was from up some- 
where in New York, and I never wanted 
to have anything to do with him, but 
your mother, poor girl, thought she 
2 



l8 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

loved him. It was a blessing to her 
that she died when she did, and I 
want you to profit by her sad expe- 
rience. Will you make me a promise ?" 
"What is it, father?" 
"Bring me the family record." 
Virginia went and fetched it. 
"Promise me on this old family rec- 
ord, out of which every trace of your 
father's name has long since been 
erased, that you will never marry 
anybody but a Virginian." 

This pledge was doubtless suggested 
by the fact that among the young fel- 
lows who sometimes called at Fairfax 
Hall was one named Perry Blair, a 
young man from Harrisburg, Pa., who 
was connected with the second survey- 
ing corps then engaged in laying out 
the Shenandoah Valley (now the Nor- 
folk & Western) railroad, after a delay 
of ten years from the first survey, 
caused by the panic of 1873. No hint 
was given that Blair was meant, but if 
the old man did not think of him, it is 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



J 9 



certain that Virginia did. But she 
promptly answered: "I promise/' 

The railroad, the building of which 
proceeded with reasonable rapidity 
after so long delay, ran through a 
corner of the Fairfax lands which still 
belonged to the original estate. Henry 
Fairfax, although in greatly reduced 
circumstances, gladly gave the right of 
way and prevailed upon many of his 
neighbors to do likewise. He mani- 
fested great interest in the building of 
the road and said he hoped it would 
never be charged of him that he had 
ever impeded progress and improve- 
ment. 

It was about this time, also, that the 
"boom-town" epidemic was sweeping 
over some sections of the country, 
leaving in its trail, a little later, destruc- 
tion and desolation. It first prevailed 
in the West and afterwards came to the 
South where, in some sections, it spread 
like the smallpox. In some parts of 



20 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

Virginia it was very virulent, and West 
Virginia had a few sporadic cases. 
The microbes of this dread disease were 
carried in the mouths of land sharks 
and in certain newspaper articles. 

Instead of quarantining against it, 
whole communities would strive to see 
which could get the worst case of it 
and keep it longest. Many of the at- 
tacks proved fatal. 

One day a stranger came to Fairfax 
Hall, and told the venerable owner that 
he wanted to purchase a tract of land 
down on the railroad. He said he rep- 
resented a "syndicate" who intended 
to build a new town. He said he was 
authorized to offer Mr. Fairfax enough 
stock in the company to pay him 
many times over the worth of the 
land. They would "let him in on the 
ground floor," and it would make him 
once more a rich man. All he had to 
do was to deed the company the land 
and take the company's certificates of 
stock in exchange. 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 21 

The old man was greatly pleased 
with the proposition, and partially gave 
his consent, but asked for a little time 
to think about it. That afternoon 
Perry Blair, whose duties still kept 
him in that vicinity, came over and 
Mr. Fairfax, who had taken a liking to 
him, although he would not have ac- 
knowledged it, told him all about the 
plan to build a new town and make 
money. Blair very promptly and very 
earnestly urged him not to enter into 
any such scheme. If he wanted to sell 
the land, and the men would pay for 
it, that was all right, but their propo- 
sition was a treacherous one. 

When the agent, who called himself 
a "promoter," came again, Fairfax told 
him that he would have nothing to do 
with his enterprise. 

But the glowing colors in which the 
promoter had painted the picture of 
the proposed new town, the rapidity 
and profit at which the building lots 
could be sold, had made a great 



22 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

impression on the old man, and he turned 
it over and over in his mind, and, like a 
snowball, it grew with the turning. 

One day he announced to Virginia 
that he intended to build a town and 
call it Fairfax City. He had worked 
out all the details of it. He was sure 
that many of his old friends would be 
glad of the opportunity to buy lots, 
and he hoped to leave her in good cir- 
cumstances when he died. 

Virginia was afraid that the idea was 
a little too large and not quite practi- 
cable, but she agreed with him that it 
would do no harm to try. 

Fairfax sent at once for Perry Blair 
to survey and lay off the proposed new 
town. 

Blair, glad of the opportunity to do 
anything for Virginia or her grand- 
father, staked off the ground and made 
the necessary plat. Fairfax had 
already selected names for the streets 
of the new Fairfax City. The princi- 
pal ones were to be called Virginia, 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



2 3 




Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Pat- 
rick Henry, Randolph, Berkeley, Lee, 
Preston, Tyler, and Jackson. 

The next step was to put the lots of 

the future Fairfax City on the market. 

One or two of Henry 

Fairfax's old friends 

promised to take two 

or three lots each, on 

condition that one 

hundred lots were 

sold. There the sales stopped. Not 

a cent had been spent or received. 

Blair, who was staying for a few 
weeks at Fairfax Hall, at the earnest 
request of the old man, "in order to 
help along with the enterprise," spent 
more time in attempting to further a 
little plan of his own than he did in 
building Fairfax City. Virginia was 
courteous to him always, but he soon 
found that instead of getting to be 
with her as much as formerly, she 
avoided him. Occasionally, however, 
some word or act of hers, when she was 



2 4 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



off her guard, made him believe that 
she was not anxious for him to leave 
the place. She had all at once become 
a mystery to him, a mystery which he 
determined to solve. 

Meantime the old gentleman paid 
no attention whatever to the young 
people. He had no thought save for 
the success of his cherished scheme to 
found a town which should bear his 
name, and thereby be able, also, to 
leave a good snug sum to his beloved 
granddaughter. As the lots were not 
selling, he got Virginia to write for 
him one day the following letter: 

Fairfax Hall, Virginia, 8 July, 1884. 
To the Editor of the Post, Washington, D. C. : 

My Dear Sir — It affords me very great pleasure 
to write once more a communication for your ex- 
cellent journal. Many years ago I was frequently 
permitted to be heard through your columns on 
questions of public concern, and, whilst what I am 
now about to say is not on any subject of statecraft, 
it is, I assure you, my dear sir, a question of pub- 
lic interest and importance. 

You and your many readers will be glad to hear 
that I have had laid off a town site on a part of the 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



25 



Fairfax estate, and that I am now in the process of 
building a city to which I have given the name 
(without undue egotism, I think) of Fairfax City. 
Streets have been laid out and have been named as 
follows: 

Virginia, Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Pat- 
rick Henry, Randolph, Berkeley, Lee, Preston, 
Tyler, Jackson, etc., — names which you will be 
glad to unite with me in honouring. I am allow- 
ing the lots to be sold at $100 each, and expect to 
dispose of at least one hundred of them during the 
present summer. 

No buildings have as yet been erected, and I 
shall leave that matter entirely to the purchasers. 

Mr. Perry Blair, an excellent young man and 
competent civil engineer, has made a survey of the 
grounds, and the plat may be seen by any so desir- 
ing at my home, Fairfax Hall, in Virginia, where 
you, my dear sir, and all others, whether interested 
in the future of Fairfax City or not, will receive a 
most cordial welcome. 

I have had a large number of lots laid off by Mr. 
Blair, so that as many of my friends as possible may 
be accommodated. I assume that no description of 
them or their location is necessary further than to 
say that they are on the Fairfax estate, in the upper 
Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. 

With assurances of my sincere regards, I am, sir, 
your obedient servant, 

Henry Fairfax, of Virginia. 

A few days later he was indignant 



26 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

beyond measure upon receiving the 

following: 

Washington, D. C, July io, '84. 
Henry Fairfax, Esq. : 

Dear Sir — Your favor at hand. Shall we insert 
it as paid matter? Our rates are 25c a line, count- 
ing eight words to the line. We await your reply. 
Yours, etc., 

Publishers the Post. 

The old gentleman was wild with in- 
dignation. He considered it a per- 
sonal insult. 

"It's a cowardly, base, infamous in- 
sult," he said, as he threw the letter to 
Perry Blair. "They know that I am 
too old to resent it personally. Be- 
fore the war any gentleman could have 
a communication published, and would 
receive the thanks of the editor instead 
of an insult. It's an infamous pro- 
ceeding, sir, infamous! I have a mind 
to go to Washington immediately, and 
make the cur apologize. I might have 
known better than to expect courteous 
treatment outside of Virginia. If I 
only had a son to challenge the fellow, 



IN THE VIRGINIAS, 27 

and wipe out this insult to the Fairfax 
name! " 

He was so wrought up that Virginia 
was greatly alarmed, fearing that the 
excitement might result seriously. 
She tried to calm him, but the more 
he thought of the matter the more 
outrageous seemed the insult. At last, 
in despair, she begged Blair to promise 
to secure an apology or avenge the af- 
front. 

Perry saw the ridiculous nature of 
the situation, but he would have done 
anything for Virginia, even to thrash- 
ing a dozen editors. So he promised 
that he would demand an apology at 
once. And this is how he did it: 

Fairfax Hall, West Virginia, July 12, 1884. 
Publishers the Post, Washington, D. C. : 

Dear Sirs — Your note in reply to Mr. Henry- 
Fairfax's letter, relating to the sale of certain town 
lots, has been handed to me. Mr. Fairfax is a 
very old gentleman, being now more than 80, and 
he fully believes that your refusal to publish his let- 
ter without pay is a personal insult. He is much 
wrought up over it, and the effect on his feeble 



28 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

health may be serious. Please humor him and 
relieve his family by writing a letter of apology and 
explanation. It will greatly please him, and will 
be appreciated by his family as an act of great 
kindness. Yours very truly, 

Perry M. Blair. 

Two days later the mails brought to 
Henry Fairfax a tender and gracious 
letter from the editor of the Post, full 
of apologies. 

When Virginia read it to the old 
man a great burden was lifted from 
his heart, tears filled his eyes, and, 
slapping Perry on the back, he ex- 
claimed: "Blair, you're a noble fellow! 
What a pity you are not a Virginian !" 

Then, kissing Virginia on the cheek, 
he said: 

"Daughter, what can we do to repay 
our young friend for wiping this stain 
from the Fairfax escutcheon ?" 

Virginia blushed red as the old fash- 
ioned roses that grew down by the 
gate, and, kissing the old man in return, 
she said: 

"I don't know, father/' 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 2Q 

"I do not want any reward for so 
small a service," said Perry. "I would 
do anything in my power to please 
Virginia — or you, sir." 

This was said to Virginia rather 
than to her grandfather, but she stood 
with her head down, and did not trust 
herself to look at him. 

Nothing further was said on the sub- 
ject then, but that night, when Vir- 
ginia kissed her grandfather goodnight, 
he put his arm about her and said: 

"Daughter, do you remember the 
promise you once made to me?" 

"Yes, father, I remember," and, go- 
ing to her own room, she threw herself 
on the bed and wept until she fell 
asleep. 

Perry did some serious thinking that 
night, too, and the next day he watched 
for an opportunity to speak to Vir- 
ginia. She tried to avoid him, but he 
would not be baffled, and, while her 
grandfather slept in his big chair, he 
walked down the lane and met her 



<20 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

coming home in the twilight from a 
neighbor's house, whither she had gone 
on an errand. 

He told her in earnest words the 
old, old story, which she had read in 
his actions over and over again, and, 
taking both her hands in his, he held 
them as in a vice. 

"Here we both stop in the path of 
life," he said, "until my question is 
answered. Have you avoided me lately 
because you do not love me, Vir- 
ginia?" 

"No, that is not the reason, but I 
can never marry you, Perry. I have 
made a sacred promise which I cannot 
break." 

Perry's mind was filled with visions 
of a rival suitor, but he was too much 
in love with Virginia to abdicate in 
favor of any man on the face of the 
earth. Finally she told him frankly 
and fully the whole story of her 
mother's unfortunate marriage, how 
her grandfather had been both father 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. ^j 

and mother to her through all her life, 
and how she had promised him that 
she would not marry outside of their 
own people. 

"The promise may have been a fool- 
ish one," she said, "but he intended it 
only for my own happiness, and I 
would not do anything to displease 
him who has been as kind and good to 
me as my mother could have been. 
No, Perry, I cannot break my promise." 

"But if the promise had never been 
made — if you were free — " 

"I cannot break my promise." 

And they walked in silence to the 
house, where the old man was still 
sleeping like a child in the big easy 
chair. 

The next day Perry said good-bye to 
Fairfax Hall, and left for his home in 
Pennsylvania. Before going he told 
Mr. Fairfax that if he could ever help 
him in his Fairfax City enterprise, to 
send for him. Virginia's good-bye was 
not so brave as she struggled to make 



<22 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

it, and she watched him until he was 
lost from view beyond a turn in the 
road — watched him with mute lips and 
a sinking heart, for Hope and Happi- 
ness rode away from her with Perry 
Blair that day down the lane, while 
Love stayed by in the old house with 
her and her childish and devoted 
grandfather. 

The failure of his cherished plan to 
build a thriving town, and give to it 
his name, had a pronounced effect up- 
on the old man's spirits. For some 
months his great interest in the enter- 
prise had kept him up, but when the 
collapse came he lost hope and heart, 
and a few days after Perry's departure 
he took to his bed. 

A week later Perry rang the old 
goblin-headed knocker at Fairfax Hall, 
and Virginia opened the door. She 
was so much surprised that she could 
only say: 

"Why, Perry!" 

He was beaming all over with hap- 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



33 



piness, and, taking her by the hand, im- 
mediately led her, half forcibly, to the 
bedside of her grandfather. Before 
she could fully realize what he was do- 
ing, he said: 

"Mr. Fairfax, I have come back to 
ask for the hand of your grand- 
daughter/* 

The old man, after two or three 
efforts, raised himself up on one elbow, 
and, looking at Virginia with an ex- 
pression of unutterable grief, said in a 
voice feeble with age and trembling 
with emotion: 

"Daughter, have you broken your 
promise ?" 

Virginia knelt down and kissed the 
furrowed cheek and replied: 

"No, father, I have not told Mr. 
Blair that I would marry him — I have 
told him I could not." 

Perry sat down by the side of the 
bed, took the old man's hand and 
placed in it a piece of paper, saying as 
he did so: 



34 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



"I know all about the promise which 
Virginia has made, and I do not ask 
her to violate it. I believe I am eligi- 
ble." 

"What is this, Virginia? I cannot 
see. Read it to me, my child. I have 
not meant to be unkind to you, but I 
would rather take you with me to the 
cold clay, out there on the hill, where 
your mother sleeps, than that you 
should suffer as she did. Read it, 
daughter, read it!" 

Virginia looked at it, and handed it 
back to Perry. 

"Have you anything against me per- 
sonally?" asked Perry, as he laid the 
bit of paper on the edge of the bed. 

"Nothing," said Mr. Fairfax, "you 
have been very kind to Virginia and 
me, very kind." 

"Then here are my credentials" — 
and he read the memorandum: 

"Perry Madison Blair, born at Harrisburg, Pa., 
Jan. 23, 1862. Son of Henry M. Blair, also a 
native of Harrisburg, Pa., whose father, Col. 



IN THE VIRGINIAS, 



35 



Perry Madison Blair, was born in Fauquier 
County, Virginia, and married Betty Mason, 
daughter of the Honorable Stuart Page Mason, of 
Virginia." 

"I got this out of the old Bible at 
home. I was not born in Virginia, 
neither was your granddaughter — she 
was born in West Virginia. Her 
grandparents were born in Virginia; 
so were mine. I do not ask her to 
break her promise. I am a Virginian 
in blood as much as she." 

Virginia had slipped her hand into 
Perry's, and Henry Fairfax, laying his 
thin skeleton hand across theirs, said: 

"Daughter, I knew you would keep 
your promise." 



THE PREACHER OF THREE CHURCHES. 



39 




THE PREACHER OF THE 
THREE CHURCHES 

In a little old town, west of the 
Blue Ridge, there used to be a man 
who, the people said, 
worshipped the Lord 
and served the devil. 
He preached Calvinism 
and eternal damnation 
on Sundays, and drew a rosined bow 
across an old violin behind closed 
doors on week days. 

The town also contained a bfood of 
lawyers, an old doctor, and a young 
one, a school teacher, some forty ex- 
perienced gossips, a hundred or so 
dogs, and about four hundred other 
inhabitants. 

The preacher didn't really live in 
the village, but a mile out on the 



4° 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



country road, and preached for two 
other congregations besides the one 
in the village. 

He was a young bachelor whom the 
spinsters frequently invited to their 
tea parties, and he made his home 
with a family who loved him, and who 
faithfully kept the secret of his violin 
playing from the public. 

The Reverend Balak Mather was a 
New Englander, and had accepted the 
call from the three churches in the 
south without making any inquiry as 
to the salary he was to receive or the 
amount of work he would be expected 
to do. He thought 
the call was a di- 
vine one, and, gath- 
ering up his fiddle 
and his Bible, he 
put the former in 
the bottom and the 
latter in the top of 
his trunk, and answered the call in 
person, just as he would have obeyed 




THE PREACHER OF THREE CHURCHES. 



4 1 



a command from President Lincoln to 
take a gun and go down and shoot 
these same brethren at the three 
churches. He never questioned a call 
from his God or his country. 

Arriving at the three churches, he 
found a scattered membership of Pres- 
byterians, hospitable and cordial, but 
as firm in the faith and as strict in 
the creed as the New Englander him- 
self; and they would have been 
shocked beyond expression if they 
had known that their new pastor not 
only played a fiddle, but had actually 
brought it with him in the same box 
with his Holy Bible. 

Nor did the conscience of the Rev- 
erend Balak Mather approve of his 
conduct. He felt that he was barter- 
ing his soul away little by little for 
the string that intoxicates. All of his 
life he had prayed earnestly but hope- 
lessly to be delivered from the temp- 
tation — prayed every morning that he 
might be able to live that day with- 



A2 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

out touching the unclean thing. But 
every evening when the twilight came 
on and a loneliness came over him, such 
as only the choice spirits of the world 
are permitted to suffer, he would for- 
get the vow of the morning, take the 
old violin out of its old green case, 
close the windows and the doors, get 
down in the darkest corner of the 
room, and, gently touching the strings, 
call forth the souls of all the old loved 
ones now dead and gone. All the 
sweet voices, all the childhood tears, 
and tales, and fancies, every kiss of 
his mother's lips, every form of speech 
that love had learned, seemed to him 
to come out of that old violin. 

And when the night was stormy 
and the wind howled and moaned, he 
would close his Bible, take up the 
violin, and, with trembling hand and 
guilty conscience, strike the strings 
until all the sins that he had ever 
committed came up out of the past, 
and he could hear the wails and sobs 



THE PREACHER OF THREE CHURCHES. 



43 



of all those who had gone down, down 
into the place of everlasting torment ; 
and the soul of the violin seemed to 
mingle with his own soul in an agony 
of unutterable misery and woe, for he 
felt that he loved the instrument with 
an unholy passion, as a man may love 
and be led to the depth of hell by a 
wicked and beautiful woman. 

His congregations knew nothing of 
all this. Their pastor was a faithful 
shepherd, leading his little flocks by 
the pure waters of Calvinism and by 
the green meadows of righteous living. 

The more he yielded to the tempta- 
tions of the siren fiddle the more he 
atoned for it by preaching the doc- 
trine of punishment and the law of 
retribution. And the more he fiddled 
the longer he preached to make up 
for it, so that sometimes his sermons 
would last an hour and a half or two 
hours. But his congregations were 
not made up of end-of-the-century 
churchgoers, who tire at a fifteen- 



44 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



minutes sermon, and who ask for a 
new pastor if the sermon lasts over 
thirty minutes. The three little flocks 
of the Rev. Balak Mather's keeping 
believed in devoting the entire Sab- 
bath — they never called it Sunday — 
to the worship of the Lord, and, as 
the preacher's sermons grew in length, 
he grew in popularity. 

One day, about a year and a half 
after accepting the call to the three 
churches, the minister was sent for to 
go thirty miles or more into the moun- 
tain to conduct the funeral of an old 
man, who had once heard him preach 
in the village. Of course he went, for 
he never refused to go where he could 
render a service. 

On his return he stopped for the 
night at a little log house in the moun- 
tain, where the cracks in the walls were 
not more conspicuous than the love 
and cheer about the hearthstone. 

One of the children was sawing 
away on a fiddle when the preacher 



THE PREACHER OF THREE CHURCHES. 



45 



entered the house, but immediately 
hid it when he saw the clerical coat of 
the stranger. The minister's trained 
and sympathetic ear had caught the 
singularly rich and sweet notes of the 
instrument, and he at once asked the 
lad to get it for him. Taking it lov- 
ingly in his hand, he pulled the bow 
across the strings, held it close to his 
ear, touched another chord or two, 
looked at it critically, saw a dim and 
blurred inscription on it, and read : 



AWonius Slradivarius. 
f Cremonen . 16 ^/. f 



If Saul of Tarsus had appeared be- 
fore him, he would not have been more 
surprised than he was to fincT there, in 
a hut in the mountain, an instrument 
bearing the name of the great Italian 
violin maker. 

" Where did you get it?" he in- 
quired of the boy. 

" Don't know; guess we've always 
had it." 



4 6 



IX THE VIRGINIAS. 



Then the preacher-fiddler ran out 
to the stable where the boy's father 
was feeding the horses — rushed out 
like an excited schoolboy — to ascer- 
tain, if he could, something about the 
wonderful instrument. 

"That fiddle ?" said the mountain- 
eer. "That's the finest fiddle in this 
part of Virginy, I reckon. It's purty 
old, but I guess it aint much the worse 
for wear. Some feller has cut his name 
on it there, but I guess that don't hurt 
it none. Where did I git it? Oh, I 
got that fiddle down in New Orleens 
when I was down there with Ben But^ 
ler's crowd, but you musn't ask me 
how I got it, for I don't want to tell a 
parson no lies." 

" But, my good fellow," said the 
parson, "don't you know that it is 
worth a big sum of money?" 

" How much'll ye give me fur 
it?" 

"I haven't enough money to buy it, 
I'm afraid, but I'll give you all I have 



THE PREACHER OF THREE CHURCHES. Ah 

in the world, which is about three 
hundred dollars." 

He could probably have bought 
it for less than twenty-five, but he 
was too honest to try to drive an 
unfair bargain, even for a Stradi- 
varius. 

It was now the mountaineer's turn 
to be amazed. He had never dreamed 
that any fiddle in the world could be 
worth half that much money. He 
thought the preacher had lost his 
senses. 

" You may take the fiddle," he said, 
"but I ain't agoin' to skin you that 
way. You may know what hymn 
books and catechisms cost, but you're 
off on catgut, parson. I've played 
'em all my life, and I never seen one 
that was wuth over twenty-five or 
thirty dollars. But if you want it, an' 
bein's its you, an' you'll give me that 
there hoss of yourn in the stable, why 
I reckon you may take the fiddle. I 
won't take no three hundred dollars 



4 8 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



of any parson's money for an old 
fiddle. It ain't wuth it." 

And so the bargain was made, the 
honest preacher telling the owner that 
if he ever sold the instrument for 
more than he gave for it, he would 
hunt him up and divide the profits 
with him. 

That night this servant of the Lord 
forgot to ask the mountaineer's family 
to join with him in prayer, and yet 
his heart was full of thankfulness and 
love for all things in heaven and on 
earth. Out among the trees, under 
the lonesome sky, he put the old 
Italian violin to his shoulder, and tears 
of love and joy filled his eyes as he 
stroked its graceful neck as a lover 
would stroke the tresses of his fair 
bride. And the music that was made 
that night in the mountain! The 
sweetness and the richness and the 
compass of it ! And the woe and the 
terror of it ! For the player was a 
true maestro, and this perfect Stradi- 



THE PREACHER OF THREE CHURCHES. 



49 



varius seemed to hold in its keeping 
the tender love and the burning pas- 
sion and the implacable hate of the 
Italian race — that Italy which made 
poets and painters and sculptors and 
murderers. 

He understood how it was that 
when Paganini played they said he 
was in league with the devil, exchange 
ing smiles with a ghastly figure beside 
him, and why the multitudes followed 
him in wild frenzy through the streets 
of Genoa ; for the two centuries be- 
tween Antonio Stradiva- 
rius, the fiddle-maker of 
Cremona, and Balak 
Mather, the preacher-fid, 
dler of the three churches, 
had crowded that old vio- 
lin with memories of all 
the victories and failures, 
all the glory and all the 
shame of the human race, 
and the preacher -fiddler 
evoked all of these memories and 




gO IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

heard, with his own ears, that night, 
alone in the mountain, out under 
the everlasting stars, the story of the 
world's tragedy! 

At least it seemed to him so, for he 
was a true musician to the tips of his 
long bony fingers. 

To those who love not the divine 
instrument, all this will appear absurd 
and strained, but it is written for those 
who know what it is to be overcome 
by the mysterious and mighty power 
of an Ole Bull, a Sarasate, a Eugene 
Ysaye or a Cesar Thomson — an influ- 
ence that has the power to intoxicate 
like wine, like the rare old wines 
which have in them the sunshine of 
heaven and the fine virtues of the 
soil. 

But this has nothing to do with our 
preacher, who was taken to the village 
the next day by the mountaineer. The 
Stradivarius stayed at the preacher's 
boarding house, and the preacher's 
horse went back to the mountain. 



THE PREACHER OF THREE CHURCHES. 



51 



Then came the fiercest battle of 
Balak Mather's life, and the turning 
point. Unconsciously and unwillingly, 
he yielded, little by little, to the soft- 
ening appeals of his musical nature, 
and his sermons to the three churches 
began to be more about love and less 
about the law — more religion and less 
theology. His congregations noticed 
it, and liked it — in spite of them- 
selves. Some of the sisters said he 
must be in love, and they discussed 
it at their quilting parties. His ac- 
tions, as well as his words, became 
more tender; he spent more time with 
the poor and the sick, and, wherever 
he went, he was a benediction. 

Many of his flock followed the lead 
of their shepherd, and the gospel of 
love became the creed of the new 
propaganda at the three churches. 

But the upheaval was bound to 
come sooner or later, and it was only 
strange that it had been delayed so 
long. 



52 



IN THE VIRGINIAS 



One day the report was started that 
the preacher played the fiddle. By 
the time it had reached the other end 
of the village, which was less than an 
hour, it said that he had lost his faith 
in the teachings of the Bible ; that he 
had his rooms full of fiddles, and that 
he sometimes kept step to his own 
playing. 

Many of his flock said they didn't 
believe a word of it, but they passed 
the story on, and one of the good sis- 
ters thought it her Christian duty to 
ride over to the other two churches 
and tell the news. 

In the minds of these good men and 
women the fiddle was inseparably asso- 
ciated with the disreputable dance hall 
and wicked actor-people, and was, in 
short, the devil's own instrument. A 
member of the church found guilty of 
playing it would have been remon- 
strated with gently but firmly, and, if 
he persisted in his wicked ways, would 
have been expelledc The report, there- 



THE PREACHER OF THREE CHURCHES. C^-7 

fore, that their beloved pastor was a 
fiddle player shocked and scandalized 
them quite as much as if it had been 
said that he had been seen drunk 
in the public street. It was the 
sole topic of conversation, and, in the 
mouths of expert and long-experi- 
enced gossips, it took on many artistic 
embellishments. 

Some of his friends, however, re- 
fused to believe the story, and defended 
him with such faithfulness that in a 
few days there began to appear indi- 
cations of a serious schism in the three 
churches. 

One Saturday afternoon a committee 
of the elders waited upon the Rev. 
Balak Mather at his boarding house. 
They found him with his well-worn 
Bible open before him, at work upon 
the sermon for the morrow. The room 
was not filled with fiddles — there was 
not even one in sight — and the books 
about him were not such as a servant 
of the devil would revel in. Their 



U IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

courage began to fail them, and they 
began to wish that they had shoul- 
dered the unpleasant duty on a com- 
mittee of the sisters. After talking 
about the weather, the finances of the 
church, the crop prospects, the ap- 
proaching county election, and the 
weather some more, until the situa- 
tion became painfully embarrassing, 
the brother who had been chosen 
previously as spokesman plunged into 
the subject by saying: "Ah — Brother 
Mather, I suppose you have heard the 
scandalous reports which have been 
started about you by evil tongues — 
about your indulging in the unholy 
practice of fiddle-playing. Of course 
none of us believe it for a moment — " 

" Oh, of course, not for a moment ! " 
put in the other members of the com- 
mittee in chorus. 

u But we wanted to be able to deny 
it officially before it gets any further. 
Brother Jones/' he said, turning to 
another of the elders, " suppose you 



THE PREACHER OF THREE CHURCHES. CCj 

draw up an official denial of the whole 
infamous business, and we will all sign 
it right here." 

Then the spokesman stroked his 
beard three times, and felt much re- 
lieved. 

Brother Jones got ready to write. 

"My good friends," said the preacher, 
" I do not know what you have heard, 
but if it is that I play the violin, as 
well as pray and preach, and try to 
help the sick and the poor, I must 
confess to my guilt. Up to within 
the past few weeks I yielded to it as to 
a besetting sin, and prayed against' it 
every day of my life, but I no longer 
consider it such. Next to the 'serv- 
ice of my God and my fellowman, I 
love an old violin which I have yon- 
der in that trunk." 

And he took out the instrument 
and laid it before them. 

His boldness and earnestness com- 
pletely overwhelmed them, and they 
sat speechless. 



56 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



Then the preacher played as even 
he had never played before — played 
as though pleading his own cause be- 
fore God and man — the tones now 
wailing and crying in despair, now 
glorious with triumphant hope and 
victory. The depths of his soul were 
broken up, and he wept, and the eyes 
of the elders were not dry. 

When they left, they said one to 
another, " verily he hath a devil/* 



The rest is soon set down. 

Shortly after the committee -of eld- 
ers had presented to the three churches 
their formal report of 
what they had heard and 
seen, the preacher-fiddler 
put his Bible and his vio- 
lin into his trunk — the 
latter accidentally getting 
uppermost this time — and 
after visiting every sheep of his three 
little flocks and saying to them he 




THE PREACHER OF THREE CHURCHES. 



57 



hoped they would, sometime, allow 
themselves to believe that music, even 
fiddle music, was not an unpardonable 
sin, he went away. 



One night, a little while ago, the 
writer of this sat with one of the old 
elders of the old church of the little 
old village w r est of the Blue Ridge in 
the Metropolitan Opera House in 
New York, and, while the audience 
came in, and the fine ladies in the 
boxes on either side discussed the 
dresses of the fine ladies in the boxes 
on the other side, he related to me 
the main facts of the story which I 
have repeated here. 

It was a great music-festival night, 
and the Boston Symphony Company 
was to give the first of a series of six 
concerts. The house was crowded, 
for it had been announced that with 
the company there was to appear 
Yriarte, a Belgian virtuoso, who had 



58 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



been turning the heads of the musical 
people on the other side of the waters 
— Paganini, they said, had come back 
to earth. Of course Society, which al- 
ways writes its name with a big S, was 
there, but there were others, also. 
There were pointed out to us in the 
audience the great composers Dvorak 
and DeKoven, Rafael Joseffy, the 
beautiful Emma Eames, Emma Juch, 
Lola Beeth, Melba, Jean de Reszke, 
and others. 

The concert began. The orchestra 
played something which I have for- 
gotten, but which made nearly as 
much noise as Berlioz's " Requiem 
Mass," and nearly took the breath 
away from the people near the 
stage. 

Then there was a great flutter among 
the beautiful birds in the boxes, a 
craning of fair necks, a jabbering among 
the foreign-looking long-haired musical- 
appearing men near us, and, after what 
seemed an interminable wait, the Bel- 



THE PREACHER OF THREE CHURCHES, 



59 



gian came on with an old tobacco-col- 
ored fiddle in his hand. He had a face 
like the pictures of Saint-Saens, and 
he stood before the great audience 
like one who had a message to deliver 
of life or death. He held the violin 
and bow both under his left arm, and, 
before beginning to play, he reached 
out his right hand and held it there 
with his open palm down, as a 
preacher might have done in asking 
God's benediction on the human 
race. Then the violin came out 
from under his arm and the bow 
fell across it — and even the boxes 
were hushed. 

Then a voice such as had never been 
heard on sea or land filled the hall, and 
all that was worth living for or dying 
for, seemed to sanctify the place — it 
was the voice of a Stradivarius in the 
hands of a maestro. 

When he had finished, and had again 
held out his long thin hand in benedic- 
tion, the audience broke into a wild 



60 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

frenzy, such as the young virtuoso of 
Genoa is said to have produced in the 
Italian towns and villages three quar- 
ters of a century ago. People rushed 
onto the stage in the wildest excite- 
ment, among them being hundreds of 
ladies. They snatched the flowers 
from their bosoms and threw them at 
him, and the excitement was so great 
that it was totally impossible to go on 
w r ith the concert that night. Only 
once before had anything approach- 
ing it been seen in this country on a 
similar occasion, and that was when 
New York went stark crazy over the 
wonderful Bulgarian pianist the win- 
ter before, when several women 
were badly hurt in the frenzied 
rush to touch the hem of his swal- 
low-tail coat. 

The two men from west of the Blue 
Ridge were among the last to leave 
the hall, and, as they did so, the old 
Presbyterian elder said to the young 
man by his side : 



THE PREACHER OF THREE CHURQHES. 6l 

" That man was he whom we used 
to know at the three churches as the 
Rev. Balak Mather." And then, after 
a long silence, "It is not a devil he 
hath, but something divine." 



62 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



THE KING'S DAUGHTER 

THERE used to be, in one of the 
interior counties in the New Domin- 
ion, an absolute monarchy. 

This kingdom was about the size of 
the realm of the Akoond of Mahoot, 
and embraced nearly the whole of one 
flourishing township. There was a 
lean mountain in it which split the 
evening cloud in two and divided the 
morning mist. And the eastern bound- 
ary of it was a river which made a 
horseshoe with which the foot of the 
mountain was shod. 

Across the river from this realm the 
land rolled away in peace, as was be- 
coming to the home of free institutions. 

The lean mountain carried a huge 
boulder on the tip of its right shoul- 
der, as if challenging the winds to 



THE KING'S DAUGHTER. 



63 



knock it off ; but the bald eagle nested 
in the clefts of it and was not afraid, 
and the wind gnawed at the alum rock 
until it looked like a giant honeycomb, 
made by the wind bees. 

On the west the kingdom was 
bounded by the finest red-fox trail 
that a hound ever put a nose to, out- 
side of the glade country. 

On the south it was not bounded at 
all, for the king's possessions straggled 
away in that direction in triangles and 
all sorts of geometrical curiosities. 

At the northern end the king had 
his home, and his dominion was 
bounded there only by the will of his 
wife. 

It was, therefore, a unique kingdom, 
and is not set down on the maps, and 
the local chroniclers have failed to 
write the history of its rise and fall. 

The first monarch was the last, and 
the royal household consisted of seven 
stalwart sons and a fair daughter, be- 
sides the queen of the king's bosom. 



6 4 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



Besides these there were of mules 
and horses quite a number, a herd of 
little mountain oxen, ring-streaked and 
striped, and flocks of sheep scarcely 
larger than mountain rabbits, and the 
royal razor-back swine, which fed on 
the corn fields of the citizens of the 
realm. There were, also, of milch 
cows, some seven or eight. 

The standing army consisted of the 
seven stalwart sons of the king. 

The ruler was of the house of Good- 
rich, and he became king by the divine 
right of wanting to, and knowing how. 
He came unto his kingdom from Penn- 
sylvania, and his kingdom came unto 
him little by little, excepting the pre- 
rogatives of a local preacher, which he 
brought with him. First, he bought 
a large tract of land, paying for it 
about the value of the squirrels that 
frolicked in its woods. Then he was 
elected a justice of the peace, and be- 
came a 'squire — and a 'squire is, as 
everybody knows, a very puissant man, 



65 

To these he added the powers of mem- 
ber of the school board, class leader, 
undertaker, timber dealer, money 
lender, mortgage holder, and Sunday- 
school superintendent. When he took 
a notion to add to his estates he fore- 
closed a mortgage, or got himself ap- 
pointed guardian of the minor children 
of some sister in the church, or cor- 
nered the coffin market. He married 
the young people, buried their chil- 
dren, attached their household goods. 

He was authority on mountain the- 
ology and the history of the Jews, and, 
as a scientist, the teacher of the town- 
ship school herself, although having 
attained the ripe age of nineteen years 
and some months, was not his superior. 

Now the key to this kingdom was a 
sway in the back of the mountain, from 
which great sticks of timber, the chief 
and only valuable product of the realm, 
were slid down to the river where they 
were rafted and sold. There was but 
one road up to this hogback, and the 

5 



66 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

king owned it, and, by means of this 
monopoly, he was able to fix his own 
price on every log that was laid at the 
foot of the mountain. 

Thus it was that he waxed rich off 
of the labor and necessities of his 
neighbors, for every stick of timber 
intended for the market must of ne- 
cessity be sold to him at the foot of 
the mountain for whatsoever he was in 
a mood to give for it. And being a 
justice of the peace, and a Biblical 
scholar, a local preacher, a Sunday 
school superintendent, an undertaker, 
and the head of a large family, he gen- 
erally was in the mood to pay about 
one-fourth as much as he could get for 
the same log on the other side of the 
mountain. 

Thus it came about by a very plain 
process that 'Squire Goodrich became 
an absolute monarch in everything 
but the title and the tinsel trappings. 

His impoverished subjects had often 
tried to find or make a road of their 



THE KING'S DAUGHTER. % (yh 

own up the mountain side on land 
which he had not yet come into pos- 
session of, but every attempt had been 
given up — the cliffs were too many 
and too high, and so they were forced 
to continue to pay tribute to Caesar 
at the foot of the mountain. 

Now, among the subjects of the king 
there were, of course, certain young 
men who had the audacity to aspire 
to the hand of the king's daughter, 
whose name was Mary, and who was 
both good and rich, exactly as her 
name said. To be truthful, I must ad- 
mit that she had never been in a 
boarding school, either at Staunton, 
Winchester, Lexington, or Lewisburg, 
and she (sad though the story be) was 
not up in soirees and the gentle art of 
murdering French, but she knew how 
to "bake a pie or cast a killing eye." 
She was the chief attraction at the 
Sunday school and at funerals, and 
she had the grace not to look with 
contempt upon the young fellows 



68 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

because they had to pay tribute to her 
father, the king, at the foot of the 
lane leading up to the sway in the 
hogback. 

Half of the young fellows of the 
neighborhood were, therefore, either in 
love with the princess or thought they 
were, which is much the same for all 
practical purposes. Two or three of 
them had gotten along so well with 
her that they had ventured in their 
rashness to speak to the king about it, 
but he only laughed at them, and told 
them that no suitor would even be 
considered until he had first made a 
timber road of his own to the top 
of the mountain. This banter was 
supposed to effectually settle the 
matter. 

Among these suitors was one John 
Merrill, who was the proud owner of 
five yoke of little steers and a few 
acres of timber land, and who, like all 
the rest, paid tribute to the king at 
the foot of the mountain. He had 



THE KING'S DAUGHTER. 



69 



good reason to believe that he stood 
well in the favor of the Princess Mary, 
but there was the king's challenge in 
the way. Love laughs at locksmiths 
and other things of man's feeble make, 
but it cannot look with contempt 
upon a hogback. 

He explained the difficulty to the 
daughter of the king, and she hast- 
ened to suggest that a tunnel be 
digged or the mountain be blasted. 
But these suggestions, though born of 
love, were not eminently practical 
from an engineering point of view. 

John went over every foot of the 
mountain, but it was of no avail. No 
log road could be constructed, not 
even for the hand of Mary, the king's 
daughter. 

Meanwhile, Mary sat all day long 
by her chamber window with pencil 
and paper in her hand. She had 
lost interest in funerals and Sunday 
schools. She was studying out a 
great problem in civil engineering. 



7° 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



Then John went to the county seat 
and stayed for the space of two days, 
and, when he came home, there were 
papers in his pocket tied about with 
lawyers' tape. 

His next step was to go to all of 
the little timber dealers like himself 
within hauling distance of the moun- 
tain, and engage every stick of timber 
they would have to sell for the next 
ten years, delivered at the foot of the 
king's road leading up the side of the 
hogback, agreeing to pay a much 
better price than the king had been giv- 
ing. All this was done so quietly that 
the king knew nothing of it. 

But Mary knew. 

When the logs began to arrive, and 
the 'squire-king learned that they 
were for John Merrill, he was amazed. 
And when John told him that he held 
a ten years' lease on the mountain, and 
intended to haul the logs up himself 
with his five yoke of little oxen, the 
king's royal wrath was kindled. But 



THE KING'S DAUGHTER. 



7* 



not all of his authority as justice of 
the peace, undertaker, Sunday-school 
superintendent, local preacher, moun- 
tain theologian and historian of the 
Jews could overawe John, for John 
had in his pocket the papers showing 
that 'Squire Goodrich had never 
bought that tract of land, leased it or 
had any title to it whatever. He had 
not even foreclosed a mortgage on it 
or paid for it so much as the value of 
the squirrels in its treetops. It be- 
longed to some heirs living over in the 
vicinity of Woodstock, and the king 
had simply appropriated it as he had 
appropriated many other things not 
his own. 

So John Merrill took legal posses- 
sion of the road up the side of the 
hogback and the key to the king's 
domain, and, in due course of time, 
grew rich, even as the king had done, 
but with more honesty. Before the 
lease had expired he bought the hog- 
back in fee simple, and became the sole 



7 3 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



owner of the key to the old man's 
kingdom. 

By that time he was himself a jus- 
tice of the peace and a Sunday-school 
superintendent, and the king was de- 
posed. 

But the ex-king continued to hold 
till his death his positions as under- 
taker, local preacher and mountain 
theologian. 

And of course Mary, the king's 
daughter — but it is well to take some 
things for granted. 




THE SKETCH CLUB BANQUET. 



73 



THE 
SKETCH CLUB BANQUET 

The nuts and fruits had been fin- 
ished, and the cigars and story tell- 
ing had commenced. 

The company was a 
delightful one. Most 
of the members of the 
club had been abroad 
more or less, and the 
free and easy flow of anecdote and 
sparkle of wit took on a foreign color. 
There were bits of Paris, touches of 
Munich, and breezes from the valley 
of the Arno. 

Doubtless there were better stories 
told than the one which I wrote down 
at three of the clock the next morn- 
ing, but it was the only one remem- 
bered at that hour or that I can recall 




74 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



now. It crowded all of the rest out of 
my mind. 

The story was told by F., one of the 
club's distinguished gray-beards. 

" It was in 1849," he said, " I think it 
was '49. I was in Paris, trying to learn 
to paint, along with a lot of other 
American enthusiasts, among whom 
was a young Virginian. He has won 
great distinction since then, and I shall 
call him simply Blank. 

"All that we knew about him was 
that he lived with amazing cheapness 
and worked with prodigal extravagance, 
and that he began to reach for the cov- 
eted prizes. By and by he carried off 
one of them, and in due time he had 
captured everything in reach, and was 
the talk of the American section of the 
Parisian art world. 

" His American fellow students, the 
American legation in Paris, and some 
other American citizens resident there 
decided to pay tribute to his remark- 
able success by giving a brilliant ban- 



THE SKETCH CLUB BANQUET. h C 

quet in his honor. The American 
Minister and his wife took great inter- 
est in it, and insisted that they be 
allowed to give the dinner at their 
residence. 

" It was a splendid affair — enough to 
turn almost any young man's head. 
The odor of a garden of roses pervaded 
the spacious rooms, and the champagne 
itself was not half so intoxicating as 
the beauty and the brilliancy of the 
ladies who had graciously lent their 
presence to do honor to the young 
painter of pictures from the hills of 
Virginia. 

"The guest of honor sat by the side 
of the wife of the American Minister, 
but all through the dinner it was 
noticed, by those near him, that he 
was silent and ate nothing. He was 
so nervous that he spilled a glass of 
water on the table. The hostess and a 
pretty girl at his right tried in vain 
to engage him in conversation. He 
did not hear them. The young girl, 



7 6 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



feeling piqued, turned to her compan- 
ion on the right, and did not again speak 
to the young artist. 

" From across the table I noticed the 
embarrassing situation, and tried to 
rally him with an attempt at a witti- 
cism, but my attempted wit and my 
effort to stir him up were alike unsuc- 
cessful. He sat there pale, haggard, 
bewildered, looking as though he were 
at the funeral of his dearest friend 
instead of being the guest of honor at 
a brilliant banquet and sitting between 
two of the fairest daughters that Colum- 
bia ever sent to France. 

" When the dinner was over, Mr. D., 
Secretary of the American Legation, 
began the toasts by proposing the 
health of the young winner of the 
Paris prizes, accompanying his toast 
with a flattering eulogy. 

" Mr. Blank, who had sat through the 
evening like a statue, suddenly jumped 
to his feet, not permitting Mr. D. to 
finish. His frame shook with emotion, 



THE SKETCH CLUB BANQUET. hh 

and he startled the guests by exclaim- 
ing: 

" ' I can endure this thing no longer. 
You have sought to honor me, and I 
ought to be thankful. I am thankful. 
None of you can ever know how much I 
appreciate it — but I cannot bear it any 
longer. Away off yonder in the Vir- 
ginia mountains is an old man who 
has toiled his life away that I might be 
here, and yet to-night there may not be 
a loaf of bread in his mountain home. I 
have often seen it so. That man is my 
father, and I cannot drink your wine 
while he has no bread. It would burn 
my throat like fire. 

"'There, too, is a young girl, fairer 
to me than the fairest in all this French 
capital, and yet the diamond in my 
hostess' hair would buy her a hundred 
gowns finer than she ever wore. That 
girl is my sister. I cannot enjoy the 
favor of your smiles and the benedic- 
tion of your beauty while she sits there 
in a homespun dress. 



7 8 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



"'And among those same blue Vir- 
ginia hills I used to know a maiden — 
but pardon me! I would serve any of 
you ladies here to-night on my knees, 
but I cannot take your praises — pardon 
me — the odor of the roses has made 
me faint ! ' 

"And pressing his hands against his 
temples, he staggered out of the room 
and into the street before the astonished 
company could recover their senses." 




THE GYPSY TRAIL. 



79 



THE GYPSY TRAIL 

The white moth to the closing bine, 
The bee to the opened clover, 

The gypsy blood to the gypsy blood 
Ever the wide world over. 

— Kipling. 

EVERY summer the gypsy band 
made their camp on the trail which 
wound like a snake from the pineries 
of Maine to the orange groves of 
Florida. 

They were of the pure Romany 
breed, who led the roving life of the 
trail for the love of it, and 
not a greasy band of loaf- 
ers, come out of the city 
because they were too lazy 
to make a living in the 
hive. Tall and dark and 
straight were they, with regular fea- 
tures and with long, black hair curling 




8o IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

to their shoulders under great-brimmed 
hats — Romanies such as travellers say 
make picturesque the villages and vint- 
age-fields of Hungary. They some- 
times traded horses and told fortunes, 
but they didn't steal, and nothing was 
too good for any visitor to their tents. 

Their horses were as fleet as the 
wind, and they were always ready 
to race, for a good snug bet, with 
any comer a-horse. The money they 
picked up this way was not inconsid- 
erable, but the pleasure they got out 
of these trials of speed and mettle was 
much more to them than the silver 
pieces. 

And they were always playing their 
violins — playing when they came, play- 
ing when they went away, and often 
leaving a savory squirrel untouched 
until it got cold because they had no 
time to eat, they had an engagement 
with their violins. Theirs was the 
first orchestra I ever heard, and I still 
think it was the best. 



THE GYPSY TRAIL. 8l 

They used to pitch their tents in 
the upper meadow by the big road 
around the bend, above where the old 
sugar-camp was, and sometimes they 
would stay for two or three weeks, 
and then, when the night was black, 
they would creep away, playing their 
low sad wails, plaintive beyond descrip- 
tion, with a lad, not a gypsy, at least 
in blood, following them sometimes 
till the morning broke, wondering if 
the golden harps, about which he had 
heard, did not make some such music. 
The thunder and roar of the great 
bands and orchestras sound to his 
grown-up ears like a hollow mockery 
compared with his memory of the wail 
of those three or four violins and a 
flageolet by the sugar-camp when the 
autumn night began to fall and those 
wild creatures, with the light of un- 
mixed Romany blood in their eyes, 
bent low as though crooning to a babe 
on the Hungary hills or the blue Dan- 
ube, and caressed their instruments as 
6 



82 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 




though they were of their own flesh 
and blood, while far away at some 
farm house a dog howled and howled 
as though his heart would break. 

Sometimes they would sing words 
like these, sitting with uncovered 
heads w r hile the lights went out in the 
tents: 



The gypsy trail is over the earth, 
And the winging bird his guide, 

But like the stars his heart is true 
Till back again at your side. 

And if the night wind steals his soul, 

And his body falls to clay, 
His spirit wanders round the world, 
„ And meets you at break of day. 

O gypsy lass ! O gypsy lass ! 

In the tent by the northern pine! 
The sea gull waits for his mate in the cliff, 

And the heart of the lad is thine. 



Or sometimes a little song, of which 
the following refrain only is remem- 
bered — coming floating faintly back 
accompanied by the low weird wail 



THE GYPSY TRAIL. 



3 3 



of the violin as the Romany put his 
dark face down close to the bow : 

The night is here, the horses wait, 

O gypsy, come away ! 

O gypsy, come away! 
The time is here when wild birds mate, 

O gypsy, come away ! 

One evening there came to the tents 
in the meadow a strange Romany on 
a jaded horse, and wearing a costume 
travel-stained, but finer than the rest, 
and in the eyes of the lad who watched 
him as he came galloping up to the 
tents he rode like a prince. His som- 
bre jacket was set off with a bit of rich 
color, and there was gilt on his horse's 
trappings. 

His hair was long and black and 
straight, and he was lithe and tall. 

That night there was a gleam of 
ugly knives out under the big sugar 
trees, a death-grapple, and a sickening 
thud on the earth — and the lad who 
had heard and seen ran away to his 



8 4 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



home, frightened nearly to death, and 
hid his head under the covers. 

That night the dog at the farm 
house on the hill far away howled all 
the night long. 

That night, also, the gypsies broke 
camp and stole away, but there was 
no sound of violin or flageolet ; and 
with the rest, it was said, there rode, 
tied to her saddle, a Romany lass who 
had been called by the name of the 
Gypsy Queen by the visitors to the 
tents, because of her picturesque 
beauty — rode with her hands bound 
together and her limbs fastened to the 
saddle, and the bridle of her horse 
tied to another's saddle-girth. This 
was the story told by a belated country- 
man who claimed to have met them 
far down the road beyond where the 
little schoolhouse stood. 

The next morning the strange horse- 
man was found lying on his face under 
the big sugars with three ugly gashes 
in his side, his life having almost 



THE GYPSY TRAIL. 



85 



poured away in the rich blood that 
soaked down into the black soil at the 
roots of the trees. 

He was picked up and carried to 
the nearest house, and an effort made 
to save his life. 

On the third day the Romany lass, 
who was known to the country people 

thereabouts as the 
Gypsy Queen, and 
who had been car- 
ried away tied to 
her saddle, startled 
the good people of 
the farm house by 
appearing at the door. She was made 
welcome, and the tender touch of her 
hand brought back to life the handsome 
stranger, inch by inch, full strength 
coming only with the coming spring. 
When they went away the Romany 
offered the household a handful of 
gold, but they would accept only his 
thanks over and over and his tears of 
gratitude. 




86 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

The autumn came again, but the 
gypsy tents were pitched no more in 
the meadow by the sugar camp, and 
since then the gypsy trail has been 
deserted. The lad waited and waited 
to hear the low sad wail of the Roman- 
ies' violins and the moaning of the 
lonesome hound on the distant hill, 
but heard them no more save in mem- 
ory, which catches the far away sound 
now and then wafted on the air when 
the twilight falls and memory sits 
down and waits. 

" For a boy's will is the wind's will, and the 
thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." 

Two or three years after the depart- 
ure of the two gypsies, a letter was 
received at the house where they had 
been so tenderly cared for, bearing 
a foreign stamp and the postmark of 
Budapest. It contained a photograph 
of two — yes, of three — and one was 
a tiny Romany with hair and eyes and 
mouth wondrous like thd lass who was 



THE GYPSY TRAIL. 



87 



called the queen of the gypsies by the 
visitors to the tent on the old trail by 
the sugar camp in the new Virginia. 
The letter contained something of 
much value besides the picture and 
the words of tender affection and grat- 
itude, and it was signed, 

Louis Teleki. 

And the mystic emblems at the 
top of the paper made the people who 
received it, and all the neighborhood, 
hold even unto this day that they had 
entertained unawares a genuine prince 
of the old wandering and fighting 
Magyar race. 



88 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 




A LITERARY ATMOSPHERE 

This is the story of a man who 
undertook to follow 
a Jekyll- and -Hyde 
career of literature 
and the law. 

In the fall of 1891 
a new sign was hung out in front of a 
modest office in a West Virginia town, 
reading : 

Byrne Hillard, 

Attorney-at-Law and Notary 

Public. 

Hillard was a young fellow who had 
finished the law course a few months 
before at the University, and had lo- 
cated in a delightful old town in the 
Ohio Valley, and was waiting for a 
victim. But the town's population was 
decorated with so many ex-governors, 



A LITERARY ATMOSPHERE. 



89 



and ex-judges, and ex-honorables, and 
big railroad attorneys, that his name 
was obscured by their brilliancy, and 
the victims passed by on the other side. 

Fortunately, he had inherited from a 
long line of ancestors a marked talent 
for taking things easy; indeed, there 
had always been a streak of genius in 
the family for sitting down and waiting, 
and it had cropped out early in Byrne. 
If all things come to him who waits, 
there was no good reason why Hillard 
should not have had a mortgage on the 
earth in due time. But the ex-governor 
across the street, the ex-judge around 
on Court Square, and the big railroad 
attorneys got the legal practice while 
he got the practice in waiting, which 
would probably prove very valuable to 
him, as he seemed likely to have a good 
deal of it to do. 

One day it occurred to him that 
while he was waiting for the big fellows 
to die, and leave to him some of their 
practice, he would write a novel — he 



gO IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

would follow in the footsteps of his dis- 
tinguished fellow Virginian and fellow 
lawyer, the writer of " Marse Chan," 
and become an Author. (In his opin- 
ion it ought always to be written with 
a big A.) 

Having once contracted the fever to 
make a book, nothing but death or 
matrimony will cure it, and, in Hillard's 
case, neither of these physicians seemed 
near at hand. Publishers sometimes 
try to sweat the fever out of the patient 
suffering with this dread disease, but 
death is the only thing this side of 
matrimony that will cure the malady. 

It was a bad case with the poor 
fellow from the start, and constantly 
grew worse. In his feverish dreams he 
could see his name in big letters on the 
title page, and hear people introduce 
him as " our rising young Author and 
lawyer." 

Perhaps he inherited a taint of this 
disease, for his great, great uncle on 
his mother's side (who was a Plympton 



A LITERARY ATMOSPHERE. gi 

of Surry county, and related to the 
Braxtons) had written "A Treatise on 
the Culture of Mint." The manuscript 
of this valuable work was found after 
the old gentleman's death, and was 
purchased by the Virginia legislature 
and published at public expense for the 
benefit of all of the gentlemen of the 
Commonwealth. A few rare copies of it 
may still be found. It contains that 
celebrated declaration, which shares the 
honors with the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, that " mint will grow to per- 
fection only on the grave of a good 
Virginian. " 

Another ancestor (also a Plympton, 
had written a poem in forty-two cantos 
of blank verse on "The Pleasures of 
Domestic Life on a Virginia Planta- 
tion, with Some Reflections on the 
Education of Youth." This disserta- 
tion possessed the merit of having the 
right number of syllables in each line, 
and r moreover, each line began with a 
capital letter. These two reasons justi- 



9 2 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



fied the author and her friends in calling 
it poetry. Unfortunately, this great 
poem was never published, for it was 
not the proper thing in those days for 
high ladies to become authors of any- 
thing except the most charming and 
lengthy letters, some of which were 
equal to Jefferson's state papers in dig- 
nity and in pureness of diction. 

And so, possessing the inherited 
genius of being able to wait patiently 
for his law practice, and the likewise 
inherited taste and talent for mint julep 
and poetry, Hillard naturally fell an 
early and easy victim to the literary 
fever. 

But taste and talent — even genius — 
count for nothing in themselves. To 
be able to turn a couplet or write an 
acceptable story, one must have dilated 
his nostrils for a reasonable length of 
time in a literary atmosphere. Byrne 
Hillard had read this in several Boston 
publications and knew it was true, and 
he further knew that a chemical test 



A LITERARY ATMOSPHERE. g<2 

would reveal about every other ingre- 
dient except the literary in the atmos- 
phere of the town in which he was 
preparing to begin his career as an able 
lawyer and famous author — his dual 
existence. 

It was a desperate situation. There 
were plenty of people in the town who 
had good libraries and read them, who 
took the magazines for the articles and 
not for the pictures, and whose opinions 
on a new book were likely to be true 
and fresh; but as they had breathed 
common West Virginia air all of their 
lives, and not a literary atmosphere, 
they, of course, could make no claim 
to being even on the fringed edges 
of the literary world. 

Hillard realized that this was a diffi- 
culty which must be overcome before 
he could even venture to select a title 
for his novel, and so he evolved an origi- 
nal scheme. He proceeded to connect 
himself with certain great literary cen- 
tres by means of sympathetic currents ; 



94 



IX THE VIRGINIAS. 



that is, he undertook to establish direct 
communication between himself and a 
dozen distinguished authors by means 
of Uncle Sam's admirable postal service. 
He thought that if he could not go to 
the mountain he could bring the moun- 
tain to him. 

From an abundance of riches he se- 
lected twelve towering names and ad- 
dressed to each of them the following 
letter : 

W. Va., Dec. i, 1891. 



Do you think it advisable for a young man who 
lives far removed from the outer limits of the liter- 
ary atmosphere to undertake any literary work ? 
What can be done to overcome this disadvantage ? 
Also, I beg you to do me the honor to glance at 
the enclosed verses, which I wrote while in school, 
and kindly tell me if there is any merit in them. 

I have adopted the law as a profession, but find 
time in the midst of my practice to devote an occa- 
sional hour to the higher pursuit of literature. 
Yours very truly, 

Byrne Hillard. 
P. S. — I enclose stamp for reply. 

B. H. 

The first answer received was not 



A LITERARY ATMOSPHERE. 



95 



especially encouraging. It was this, 
printed on a neat little slip of paper : 

Boston, Dec. 5, 1891. 
Dr. Homos regrets that he is not able to answer 
all of the inquiries that come to him from unknown 
friends, and must beg to be excused. 

Nor was the second any more inspir- 
ing : 

New York, Dec. 6, '91. 
Mr. Byrne Hi I lard : 

Dear Sir — In answer to your inquiry let me say 
that I do not see why you might not be able to induce 
the government rain -makers to turn their attention 
to the problem which troubles you. If they can 
produce rain they ought to be able to create at short 
notice almost any kind of atmosphere desired. In- 
deed, I think they may have in stock one that might 
exactly suit the needs of your town. 
Yours, etc., 

Julius Haw Thorne. 

The letter was written with a type- 
writer, but was redeemed by an auto- 
graph signature. Hillard clipped off 
the name, and, making a little ball of 
the rest of the letter, he threw it indig- 
nantly into the fire. 



q6 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

The next was better : 

New York, Dec. 6, '91. 
Mr. Byrne Hillard — If you have the literary 
taste and talent, the surroundings do not matter so 
much. If it is in your brain and heart, 'tis better 
than for your neighbor to have it or for it to be in 
the atmosphere. 

As for your verses, I find some promising lines in 
them. Sincerely yours, 

E. C. Steadyman. 

Hillard read this letter a half dozen 
times at least, and said to himself : " In 
my opinion, Steadyman is the ablest 
critic this country has produced. " 

The next day he got the following: 

Boston, Dec. 6, '96. 
[Dictated.] 

Dear Sir — I suppose your letter is another 
autograph-hunting scheme. Not having courage 
enough to ask for what you want, you try to obtain 
it by false pretenses. 

There was no signature to this, and, 
as he had several Boston names on his 
list, he was a little in doubt as to who 
the writer was. 



A LITERARY ATMOSPHERE. Q>7 

The next letter from Boston contained 
the true Bostonic idea, and read : 

Boston, 9 Dec, 

Byrne Hillard, Esq.: 

Dear Sir — The only remedy I zzm suggest is 
for you to move to Boston. Yours, etc., 

T. Baldrich. 

Then the answers quit coming. He 
was sure that he would get a reply from 
Mr. Powells, for he had added a few 
extra lines to the letter which he had 
sent to the celebrated novelist, in which 
he paid a compliment to that author's 
"Fall of Simon Lapsus/' "A Choctaw 
Winter," and " Hazardous Misfor- 
tunes." 

But Mr. Powells never answered . 
likewise, Mr. Fawton and Mr. Stockett. 

Hillard's attempt to connect himself 
with the great literary centres by the 
mail service had not proved to be a 
brilliant success. He had made a col- 
lection of three or four autographs, but 
he could not notice that they added any 

7 



g8 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

decided literary flavor to the atmos- 
phere of the town. Perhaps it was 
because he kept them carefully locked 
up in his desk along with his diploma 
and other sacred things. 

Meanwhile, the ex-governors and the 
ex-judges, and the ex-honorables, and 
the big railroad lawyers continued to 
carry off the law practice. 

Hillard finally came to the conclusion 
that a home-made literary atmosphere 
would be much better than an imported 
one anyhow, and that it didn't make a 
bit of difference whether Powells and 
the rest of them answered his letters or 
not. He would proceed at once with 
his novel, and at the same time would 
attempt to organize a literary club in 
the town. 

He had no difficulty in getting a 
dozen women and a half dozen men of 
education and culture to compose a 
club, which they called the Lanier 
Circle, and which met every two weeks. 
Hillard was elected president of it, and 



A LITERARY ATMOSPHERE. 



99 



held the office until — but that's later 
on. 

One of the members of the club was 
Miss Stover, a most estimable lady, 
born in Virginia and reared in West 
Virginia, although she had always lived 
in the same town, but thirty or thirty- 
five years only ripen the mind for lit- 
erary appreciation. Moreover, Miss 
Stover had an aunt who was supposed 
to be " connected " with one of the New 
York magazines. 

Miss Stover was elected secretary of 
the Lanier Circle, attended regularly, 
and manifested a sympathetic interest 
in Hillard's effort to replace some of 
the ordinary West Virginia ozone with 
a more literary sort. 

Very naturally, the first subject dis- 
cussed was the great need of an organ- 
ization of this character and the pov- 
erty of the place in respect of these 
things. Miss Stover and two or three 
other members feared at first that a 
breath might blow over from Bohemia, 



IOO IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

which, of course, would be very shock- 
ing, but the decision of the Circle, 
after mature deliberation, was that a 
literary atmosphere did not necessar- 
ily imply the odor of cigarettes and 
cheese sandwiches and an acquaint- 
ance with the soiled edges of society. 

The Lanier Circle rolled along nicely, 
and Hillard soon began to find breath 
suitable for his nostrils. The waiting 
for his law practice continued good, 
and at last he began his novel. Of 
course, the Lanier Circle knew of it, 
and was full of delight and pride — and 
suggestions. 

Miss Stover hoped he would give it 
plenty of local color, but there seemed 
a good deal of uncertainty as to what 
its complexion would be. 

When the first five or six chapters 
were finished, Hillard read them to 
the Circle. It lacked "intensity," was 
the only criticism. There was not 
ardor and glow enough. There was 
not feeling enough — not enough" soul- 



A LITERARY ATMOSPHERE. JOI 

yearning/' as one of the members 
put it. 

But Miss Stover thought that it 
was "perfectly lovely," adding that she 
was sure the closing chapters would be 
less cold. 

A week or two later, Hillard received 
the following mysterious letter: 

Office of the Woman's Bloomer, 
New York, Aug. 4. 
Mr. Byrne Hillard : 

Dear Sir — I am sure you will pardon this letter 
when I tell you that I am much interested in the 
success of the Lanier Circle, and have kept posted as 
to its proceedings from the beginning. Its object is 
a most worthy as well as a most delightful one, and 
if I can be of any service to the Circle, please do not 
hesitate to call upon me. 

I am especially pleased to hear (you must not 
ask how I heard it) that you are engaged in a crea- 
tive literary work, and that it gives promise of such 
great success. 

Having said this much, you will permit me to pre- 
sume on my age and experience in the literary life 
to offer a little advice. I am firm in the belief that 
no great novel or poem can be written by one who 
has not been deeply moved by the divine passion 
of love. It is a fundamental law of literature. 



102 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

There is no escaping it. No exception to this 
rule worthy of consideration can be pointed out. 

Art is not cold. The highest art burns like fire. 
No author can write of love or life unless he knows 
what it is — for love and life are one and the same 
thing. 

I am told that your story reveals remarkable 
talent, but that one thing is lacking. 
Think upon what I have said. 

Your well-wisher, 
(Mrs.) Anastasia Caroline Binner, 

Associate editor Woman's Bloomer, 

The budding young novelist didn't 
quite know what to make of this. 
Who was Mrs. Anastasia Caroline Bin- 
ner, anyhow? And how did she know 
anything about him? And so he must 
either curb his literary ambitions or 
hunt up a girl and proceed deliberately 
and with malice aforethought to- fall 
in love with her! 

How was he to find her? He might 
advertise in the town papers, stating 
his wants and submitting plans and 
specifications of the sort of girl desired. 

And ought he to warn her of the 
impending disaster when he met her? 



A LITERARY ATMOSPHERE. 



I0 3 



How long would it likely take him 
to fall deeply enough in love so that 
he could proceed safely with his novel ? 

And having gotten in once, how was 
he to get out? 

He might stand it, but what was 
the poor victim to do? 

If he took this course of bichloride- 
of-love treatment for literary coldness, 
would he have to re-write the fftst 
half-dozen chapters of his story, or 
could he work enough soul-yearning 
into the last half to make a good aver- 
age for all? 

Perhaps it would depend upon the 
quantity of the medicine taken. 

And while Mrs. Anastasia Caroline 
Binner was so kind as to prescribe the 
remedy, free of cost, why didn't she 
pick out the victim for him while she 
was at it ? 

These, and many other questions, 
occurred to him as he pondered this 
problem of love and literature. 

Suddenly he remembered that once 



104 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



upon a time he had heard somebody 
say that Miss Stover had an aunt in 
New York who was connected with a 
woman's magazine. 

And scales two inches thick fell 
from his eyes ! 

"Oh, ho ! This literary atmosphere 
seems to be having its effect/' said 
Hillard, as he threw Mrs. Anastasia 
Caroline Binner's valuable autograph 
letter into the waste basket. 

Then he went to his desk, took out 
the manuscript of his story and read 
it critically, and came to the painful 
conclusion that the Lanier Circle 
critics were right. 

"But I'm not going to fall in love 
just for the literary value of it," he said. 

"It would be like loving a girl for 
her money. I'm getting disgusted 
with this whole business, and guess I'll 
go up to Dora's and have some music." 

And Dora — who was Dora? 

She wasn't a member of the Lanier 
Circle, and wasn't worried at all about 



A LITERARY ATMOSPHERE. IOC 

the atmosphere of the place, but she 
was the prettiest girl in the town and 
her — but that was enough distinction 
for one girl, for that old town was 
blest above the cities of the earth in 
this particular. 

During July and August the Circle 
suspended operations, and Hillard's 
manuscript was also allowed to rest un- 
disturbed. He argued with himself 
that the kind of warmth he would be 
likely to work into it during the dog 
days would hardly be the kind advised 
by Mrs. Anastasia Caroline Binner, as- 
sociate editor of the Woman s Bloomer. 

And then lounging on the big broad 
piazza at Dora's was a much more 
agreeable occupation. 

Miss Stover inquired of him fre- 
quently about his novel, and assured 
him of her great interest in his liter- 
ary ambitions, but these ambitions 
remained stuck away in a pigeonhole 
with the manuscript. 

Two miles below the town there is 



I06 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

an island, rich in romance and story. 
Once it was the scene of a gigantic plot 
against the government; now its soil 
of marvelous richness yields treasures 
of corn and wheat, and, in the balmy 
summer nights, men and maidens dance 
and swing and make love under the 
great oaks that grow by the water's 
edge. Art has not builded there 
gravel walks nor luxuriant summer 
houses, but the green willows wave a 
welcome to the sun-scorched city and 
the tall sycamores invite to swing from 
their leopard branches. 

Of the famous old mansion which 
long years ago was presided over by a 
mistress of celebrated beauty and cul- 
ture, there remain only a few founda- 
tion stones, some pieces of furniture, 
and the deep old well, over which it is 
said, if troth be plighted, fortune and 
happiness will follow. 

When the Lanier Circle began to re- 
volve again in September, it had its 
first meeting on this island, and cele- 



A LITERARY ATMOSPHERE. 



I07 



brated the event by inviting a number of 
outsiders and making it a social affair. 
There was dancing in the pavilion, 
swinging and bowling. 

Hillard and Dora strolled over to- 
wards the old well, and were gone so 
long that the literary feature of the 
outing was delayed. 

When they returned to the pavilion 
Hillard directed the programme in a 
distracted manner, and when it was 
finished he announced to the Circle 
his resignation as its president, giving 
as his reason that he intended to begin 
at once the earnest practice of the 
law, giving it henceforth his entire 
time and attention, adding that his 
success in his first suit, during the re- 
cent term of court, had encouraged 
him to drop everything else. 

And there was but one person on 
the island who kn^w that he had ever 
had a suit, and she blushed the color 
of the sun which at that moment was 
going down beyond the Ohio hills. 



ioS 



IX THE VIRGINIAS. 



HIS LAST CAMPAIGN 

I TAKE great pleasure in introduc- 
ing to you the only real, live genius I 

ever knew. And 
he is dead. When 
he died he had 
the largest funer- 
al ever given to a 
private citizen in 
the Vi r ginias. 
His age was any- 
where from sixty to one hundred and 
ten, and those who had known him for 
a generation said he had never been any 
younger. He certainly never got any 
older. In his earlier days he had pre- 
tended to preach. In his later days 
he had pretended to practice at the 
law. He was always pretending to 
run for office. But he never really 




HIS LAST CAMPAIGN. 



IO9 



preached, or practiced law, or held an 
office — and his name was Uncle Billy 
Stokes. 

Uncle Billy was the great original 
Office Seeker. There was never 
known to be a convention of either 
party in his county at which he 
did not offer himself as a candidate 
for some office. He always nominated 
himself, dwelling at length upon his 
imagined public services and his pecul- 
iar fitness for the particular office to 
which he aspired at that particular 
time. If the office required a knowl- 
edge of the law he would say : 

" My Fellow Citizens — It does not become 
me to speak of my own superior attainments, and 
I need only remind you that I attended the Har- 
vard Law School (he really never read a law book 
in his life) they know everything there, they told 
it to me and I remembered it." 

If the office required executive abil- 
ity, he would ask them to recall his 
firm and brilliant administration of 
the affairs of state when he " had the 



HO IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

honor to be governor of the common- 
wealth." 

If the particular office to which 
Uncle Billy aspired was a legislative 
one, he would button his old long coat 
about him, mount the platform, and 
begin by saying : 

" My Countrymen — When your humble 
servant and John Randolph had the honor of rep- 
resenting this great commonwealth in the Senate 
of the United States," etc. 

Everybody humored the old man, 
and a speech by him was a fixed fea- 
ture of every political convention held 
in the town of M — - for many years. 
Some of his old friends usually gave 
him two or three complimentary votes 
in convention, which pleased him great- 
ly, and he would talk of the " enthu- 
siastic support/' which invariably came 
to him and of the faithfulness and 
firmness with which his friends stood 
by him " regardless of party." 

When there were no conventions to 
attend in his own county, he would 



HIS LAST CAMPAIGN. I I I 

often visit an adjoining county, and 
deliver the same speeches there. And 
he was always a welcome visitor, for 
he was so unique and so pompous with 
his long-tailed coat and his old silk hat 
of the vintage of a former generation. 
And so it came about that Uncle Billy 
Stokes, the Office Seeker, was the 
best known man in that part of the 
State. 

On one occasion, at a county con- 
vention, he created something of a 
sensation by announcing that he had 
decided not to be a candidate for sher- 
iff at that time although, he said, he 
knew that the office was easily within 
his reach, because, he said, " My old 
friend Colonel Howe is a candidate, 
and as he was my efficient clerk when 
I was judge of this circuit many years 
ago, I will not stand in his way. I 
yield to the demands of my higher na- 
ture and withdraw in favor of my old 
and faithful friend, Colonel Howe." 
And when Howe was nominated Uncle 



H2 EH THE VIRGINIAS. 

Billy was sure that his own magnanim- 
ity had made it possible. 

The opposing party held their con- 
vention on the following Saturday, and 
our old friend was there, of course. 
When nominations for the office of 
sheriff were called for, he took the 
platform by the side of the chairman, 
and begged leave to announce that he 
had decided to decline to run, for the 
reason that his old friend, Judge Wil- 
son, with whom he had served in Con- 
gress so many years, and with such 
close and pleasant relations, was a can- 
didate. He therefore hoped that it 
would be the pleasure of the conven- 
tion to nominate Judge Wilson, and 
that both he and Colonel Howe might 
be elected. It so happened, however, 
that neither had that honor, for the 
Populists run in a candidate and beat 
both Wilson and Howe. 

These were the only two occasions 
on which he ever " declined to run." 
On all others he was a candidate, and 



HIS LAST CAMPAIGN. 1 1 * 

was always satisfied with the two or 
three votes which he was certain to 
receive. 

Uncle Billy had his political head- 
quarters, too, like all great statesmen, 
all the year round, where he planned 
his campaigns, and from which he sent 
out orders to his lieutenants. These 
headquarters were on a well-whittled 
store-box in a dingy little general store 
across the street from the courthouse, 
and in Chancery Row, so called be- 
cause two lawyers besides Uncle Billy 
had their offices there. I say besides 
Uncle Billy, for he had a sign out 
over the side door of the store which 
read : 

Patrick Henry Stokes, 
Attorney-at-Law. 

Although, as I have said, he had 
never read a law book, and, of course, 
had never been admitted to the bar. 
Nobody knew whether his name was 
really Patrick Henry or William, but 
8 



ii4 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 




he always called himself the former, 
and everybody else always called him 
Uncle Billy. 

This old store-box was the scene of 
many an interesting event in the polit- 
ical and social life of the village. Here 

Judge B— , 
Col. McG— , 
Dr. K— and 
other choice 
spirits met 
nightly in the 
winter time 
and talk politics 
and with Uncle 
Billy, who was the best spider player 
of them all, and who was permitted 
also by common consent to pass 
final judgment on all questions of 
political issue. Here it was, as I have 
said, that he organized his political 
campaigns. As soon as one election 
was over he began to get ready for 
the next. He would say to his friends 
about him, from his seat on the store- 



to play dominoes, 
with one another 



HIS LAST CAMPAIGN. 



IJ 5 



box, while the game of dominoes pro- 
gressed : 

"My Friends — And I am happy to call 
you all my friends — I have been approached 
by a number of prominent gentlemen to-day, re- 
gardless of party, and solicited to permit my name 
to be used two years from now as a candidate for 
the legislature, and whilst I appreciate the com- 
pliment I have said to them that whilst I have no 
political aspirations or ambitions, I am in the hands 
of my friends, and would not refuse the call of my 
countrymen to serve them. I do not think it be- 
coming in one who has been so often honored with 
the trust and confidence of his fellow citizens to 
refuse to obey when duty calls, but I have said to 
all my friends to-day that such a nomination must 
come wholly unsolicited upon my part. A gentle- 
man of my standing and services to his country 
could not, of course, consent to become a candidate 
in the vulgar sense for any office in the gift of the 
people. At the earnest solicitation, therefore, of 
many friends, representing all parties, I have re- 
luctantly given my partial consent to represent this 
county in the legislature two years hence." 

Then everybody would stop playing 
dominoes long enough to pledge him 
his support. 

Thus his campaign for the legisla- 



Il6 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

ture would be inaugurated, but it was 
more than likely that before a week 
had passed Uncle Billy would forget 
that he was getting ready to run for 
the house of delegates, and would 
announce to his assembled friends 
about the store-box that he was in 
receipt of numerous letters from all 
parts of the state urging him to accept 
the nomination for governor, which he 
had very reluctantly, and much against 
his inclination, consented to do. 

And everybody would stop playing 
dominoes and crowd around him with 
the usual pledges of support. 

One evening Uncle Billy went as 
usual to the store to resume his dom- 
inoes, and his political discussions with 
his friends Judge B — , Col. McG — , 
Dr. K — , and the rest. The store was 
closed, and the proprietor could not 
be found. He had gone out of town, 
and had taken the key with him. He 
had not been courteous enough to leave 
even an excuse or an apology. Uncle 



HIS LAST CAMPAIGN. ny 

Billy was righteously indignant. Such 
an outrage on the rights of the people 
had never been committed or dreamed 
of in the village. The audacity of the 
act lay in the fact that the owner of 
the store was also the mayor of the vil- 
lage, and his closing the store for one 
whole evening, without their knowl- 
edge or consent, was considered by all 
of the domino-politicians, and espe- 
cially Uncle Billy, as an act of tyranny 
which could not be endured in silence. 
Some practical jokers fed the fires of 
Uncle Billy's wrath with incendiary re- 
marks, and proposed that an indigna- 
tion meeting of the citizens of M — be 
called at once. Some small boys caught 
up the idea, and, with Uncle Billy's ap- 
proval, they ran to the old courthouse 
and began ringing the bell. 

Now, the ringing of the courthouse 
bell was a most significant and impor- 
tant event in that town, and in ten 
minutes half the population at least 
had assembled at the square to see 




Il8 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

what the matter was. The practi- 
cal jokers from about the foot of the 
store-box throne of the Office Seeker 
were mixed in the crowd, one of them 
with a string of resolutions in his 
pocket hastily scribbled down. Uncle 
Billy called the house to order, and 
made a speech in which he told the 
people that their liberties were threat- 
ened, and their rights were being 
trampled under the feet of tyrants. 
The storekeeper-mayor was compared 
to Caesar, George III., Nero, Caligula, 
the Czar of all the Russias, and the 
rest of the tyrants of history. "When 
I had the honor to be mayor of this 
town," said the speaker, " every citizen 
had his inalienable rights sacredly pre- 
served, and I can see in the faces before 
me a call to again assume the duties 
of that high and responsible office. ,, 
When he sat down, the joker, with 
his resolutions in his pocket, pulled 
them out, and read them and moved 
that they be adopted. They resolved 



HIS LAST CAMPAIGN. ug 

that the country was rapidly drifting 
in a merciless current towards Csesar- 
ism, and expressed the opinion that 
the beheading of tyrants was the chief 
end of man. 

The crowd saw the joke, and adopted 
the bloody resolutions unanimously. 
It was a proud hour for Uncle Billy, 
and one to which he often referred, 
but the next evening he took his place 
as usual on the store-box, and an- 
nounced to his friends, the mayor in- 
cluded, that he had yielded to the 
demands of this crisis in the history of 
the town, and had consented to allow 
himself to be elected mayor at the 
next election. 

It was about a year after this epi- 
sode that the Office Seeker made his 
last campaign. He had not been able 
to occupy his accustomed place in the 
grocery with the regularity of former 
times, but the game of dominoes went 
on, and, whenever he was able to 
be present, the "boys" showed him 



120 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

unusual attention, for they all liked the 
half-witted, kind-hearted old man and 
humored his every wish. He had an- 
nounced to his own select circle, as 
usual, that he had yielded to the earn- 
est solicitations of his friends, and had 
consented to run for the legislature. 

Then the Domino Club laid a 
scheme. They determined to humor 
the poor old fellow by securing his 
nomination. The nominating conven- 
tion was to be a mass meeting of voters, 
and the Domino Club went forth 
quietly and visited every neighbor- 
hood in the county, telling their friends 
confidentially that they simply wanted 
to give Uncle Billy enough com- 
plimentary votes in convention to 
please his vanity, as it was not proba- 
ble that the old man would be able to 
attend many more conventions. 

When convention day came the old 
courthouse was crowded. The first 
order of business, after appointing the 
usual committees, was the nomination 



HIS LAST CAMPAIGN. 121 

of a candidate for the house of dele- 
gates. The name of a young lawyer 
was presented by a country school 
teacher, in an eloquent speech, and 
then Uncle Billy went tottering up to 
the platform. His long coat was out 
at the elbows more than usual and 
fringed at the bottom, and his voice 
was thin and cracked, but he was as 
erect as any man in the house. He 
made the same little speech which he 
had made so many times on like occa- 
sions, alluding to his great public serv- 
ices and the demand of the people 
that he consent to take up the bur- 
den of office once more. 

Judge B— and Col. McG— both 
spoke in his behalf, and when the 
ballots were counted, everybody ex- 
cept the Domino Club, was amazed to 
hear the chairman announce that 
William Stokes was the nominee of 
the Democratic party for the house of 

delegates for the county of . 

No, not everybody — Uncle Billy him- 



122 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

self seemed to take it as a matter of 
course. He thanked the convention, 
and assured them that Patrick Henry 
Stokes would never betray the high 
trust imposed. 

That night he held a reception about 
his political throne on the old store- 
box in Chancery Row, and told mar- 
velous stories of his public services as 
governor, judge, senator, and legislator 
— stories woven out of a disordered 
mind, but patiently heard by pitying 
friends. 

He was not present at his usual 
place the next night, nor the next, and 
his old friends hunted him up in his 
miserable quarters and found him un- 
able to leave his bed. They gave him 
every attention, and he lingered for 
several weeks, talking constantly of 
what he would do for the people of 
his countv and commonwealth when 
he got back to the legislature. 

For the last day or two he lay un- 
conscious, but on the evening when he 



HIS LAST CAMPAIGN. 



123 



stepped across the river, which for him 
had narrowed down to a thread, they 
heard him say : 

"Mr. Speaker, when last I had the 
honor to represent my county in this 
body" — and the old Office Seeker slept. 

His funeral was the largest ever seen 
in that part of the State. The court- 
house bell was tolled, the Domino 
Club acted as pall bearers for their old 
friend, and a stone was erected above 
his grave by public subscription. The 
other day, in strolling through the little 
cemetery at M — , I found it, and read 
thereon these words : 

UNCLE BILLY, 

HE HAS MADE HIS LAST CAMPAIGN. 








---=^gf^ 



124 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



A TALE OF FOURTH 
STREET 

FOURTH street is Cincinnati's stylish 
promenade. Nowhere are there su- 
perber women or 
smarter turnouts. The 
wealth of Clifton and 
the elegance of Wal- 
nut Hills may be seen 
there any bright after- 
noon. The thorough 
gentleman feels like 
walking hat in hand 
from Main street to 
Elm. But these fine 
not notice him if he 
glorious shops are on 




ladies would 
did, for the 
Fourth street. 

A few years ago a lad left his hard 
and barren home in the Big Sandy 



A TALE OF FOURTH STREET. I2C 

country and found his way to the 
Queen City. He was upon no errand, 
and he had no definite object in view, 
but he felt that there must be better 
things in the world than this starved 
life of the hills. But his ideas were 
very vague and uncertain. Books had 
not been his, and the tender touches 
of culture were not felt in his home. 
But he knew that it could not be so 
everywhere. There could not be so 
much beauty in river and hill and sun 
and sky and none in human life. So 
with the next timber rise he went with 
the raftsmen, and by and by found 
himself in the great city. It was 
night. The splendor of the lights, the 
shops and the throngs dazzled him. 
For half the night he tramped the 
streets, lost in wonder. It was a new 
world to him. He stood at the base 
of the Cathedral and watched it rise 
above him like one of his own hills 
crowned with a giant poplar shorn of 
its limbs. He heard the music from 



126 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

the concert halls. He saw the great 
folks drive by in their carriages home 
from the theaters. Then he went 
back down to the river's edge, and slept 
with the raftsmen till morning. His 
companions left him, returning to their 
homes and to the life in the Big Sandy 
country with which they were full con- 
tent, but he was not lonesome. Even 
the odors from the gutters were sweet 
to him. In the wild intoxication of 
these new scenes he felt that even the 
granite pavements and the great stone 
buildings were his companions, and 
these fine ladies on Fourth street his 
friends. For was he not walking the 
same street with them? Was he not 
almost touching their soft garments? 
Was he not enveloped with the per- 
fume that blew from their lace hand- 
kerchiefs? Was he not in the very 
shadow of their white parasols? 
Could he not hear their voices — voices 
such as he had supposed were to be 
heard only in dreams — voices sweeter 



A TALE OF FOURTH STREET. 



127 



than the thrush-song, to which he had 
listened many a morning long? And 
could he not feast his eyes on them 
until he was drunk with delight ? 

Surely they would not care, for they 
would not notice him, they would not 
even see him. 

It was something more than the 
completely satisfying of his great and 
untutored love for the beautiful. He 
felt for the first time in his life the 
benediction that falls from a beautiful 
woman's face. 

Thus for days this lad from the 
mountains was the happiest being in 
all the city. He did not see the rag- 
pickers and the beggars. He ate and 
slept among rough men down by the 
river, but he cared not for them, and it 
cost but little. 

At the end of a week he discovered, 
however, that the little money he had 
saved, with which to see the world, 
was nearly all gone. Then he began 
to look for work. 



128 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

The granite pavements and the 
great stone buildings did not seem to 
be his companions now, and the fine 
ladies on Fourth street were not his 
friends. He did not notice the per- 
fumes from their lace handkerchiefs, 
and, when their soft gowns brushed by, 
they seemed to sweep him off the 
street. He realized that he had not a 
friend in the city, where six days be- 
fore everybody and everything were 
his friends. He asked for work street 
by street, and from shop to shop. His 
feet were sore and his heart was sick. 
He tried the gardens in the suburbs 
and the great stores in the city. No- 
body wanted him. There was nothing 
that he could do. He thought of go- 
ing back to his old life among the 
hills, but he would rather die than do 
that, so he searched on. 

One day, tired out with fruitless 
search, he leaned against a post on 
Fourth street, wondering what to do 
next. The day was fair and the 



A TALE OF FOURTH STREET. I2Q 

street was thronged. He felt now that 
he hated all of these fine people, and 
his hatred grew bitter and desperate. 
What right had they to be so happy? 
Was the world made for them alone ? 
Was there no room in all this big town 
for him ? 

Two ladies passed by. One of them 
dropped her handkerchief. He picked 
it up, ran after her, and handed it to 
her. She smiled and thanked him. 
And such a smile ! He had never 
seen anything so sweet before, 
and her. voice was something to 
remember. When she turned to 
thank him, he saw a face fairer 
than the flowers that grew by the 
brook on the mountain side, and he 
was almost sure that her gloved fin- 
gers touched his great rough hand as 
she took the dainty bit of lace. She 
did not know that she had touched 
his coarse hand, but it thrilled him 
with a strange delight. 

Then he said to himself: "No, 
9 




i 3 o 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



I will not go back to the hills; I 
would rather die here than to do 
that." 

Again he tramped the streets in 
search of work — anything that rough 
but willing hands could do, but every 
day he went back to Fourth street, and 
eagerly scanned the faces that crowded 
by him. She was not among them. 
The hope of seeing that face again had 
given him strength to continue his 
hunt for a place where he might earn 
enough to pay for his miserable lodg- 



ings. 



Once he saw her step into a carriage 
driven by a stiff coachman, and watched 
them go down the street and become 
lost in the crowd. 

This was enough to nerve him for 
another week's search, and, at the end 
of it, he had succeeded in getting a 
place with an old man who kept a 
curious junkshop down at the west 
end of Fifth street. Meanwhile he 
had gone every day to his favorite 



A TALE OF FOURTH STREET 1^1 

spot at Race and Fourth, and watched 
and waited for the one face in the 
world which any longer had any attrac- 
tion for him. The other fine ladies 
were now as unnoticed by him as he 
was by them. Once he thought he 
saw her coming, but a policeman made 
him get away from the corner and he 
lost sight of her. 

For the last three days of his search 
for employment he had had but one 
meal, and had slept at night on the 
ground in a little corner down by the 
river. 

It was Saturday morning when he 
was to begin working for the old man 
with the curious junkshop down on 
Fifth street, and, exhausted and starved 
though he was, he was happy in the 
thought that at last his unceasing 
search had resulted in something. 

It had indeed resulted in more than 
he thought. When he tried to rise 
from his earthen bed he found himself 
too weak to do so. He was no longer 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



I 3 2 

hungry, but his head was burning, and 
the earth on which he lay seemed to 
hold him down. The hot sun came 
down upon him, but it burned less 
than the fever that had seized him. 
It was late in the afternoon before he 
was discovered and taken to a hospital. 
By the next evening he was delirious. 

Nobody knew who he was nor where 
his home. They only knew that when 
the fever was raging he would say: 

"I wonder why she never comes any 
more. I have been here every day, 
and she has not gone by. Is there no 
room for me on this sidewalk? May I 
not stand here and wait? Maybe she 
will come/' 

Then he grew worse and weaker, 
and the last they heard him say was: 

"Stand aside ! She is coming now !" 

And they buried him in the potters- 
field. 



THE STORY OF AN OIL STRIKE. 



x 33 



THE STORY 
OF AN OIL STRIKE 

" I WILL give you a one-eighth 
royalty for a five-years' lease of your 
twenty-acre lot," said the agent to old 
man Richards — John Richards — 
whose little patch of land was sup- 
posed to be within the oil belt. 

The oil excitement which had struck 
the neighborhood was about of the 
usual virulence. Everybody expected 
to become wealthy enough within the 
next twelve months to own a railroad, 
and within the next two years to be 
able to run for office. 

To be sure, there were no producing 
wells nearer than fifteen miles away, 
but it was easy enough for anybody to 



I 2J. IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

see that his own farm was directly on 
the forty-five degree line. Anybody 
who could draw a straight line could 
see that much. 

But John Richards couldn't draw a 
straight line, and didn't seem likely to 
take the oil fever with which his neigh- 
bors were all afflicted. 

" No," he said to the agent, " I won't 
lease the place. I don't care whether 
you strike oil or not. What good would 
it do me ? Suppose I should get fifty 
thousand dollars out of the lot, what 
good would it do me? There's no- 
body living that I care for or that cares 
for me. No, the oil may stay down in 
the ground where it belongs." 

For at least forty years — nobody 
seemed to know how long — John 
Richards had lived almost the life of a 
hermit, and he was now seventy years 
of age. He had come out to this neigh- 
borhood in West Virginia, bought the 
twenty-acre lot, and had made neither 
friends nor enemies. He lived alone, 



THE STORY OF AN OIL STRIKE. 



J 35 



did his own cooking, and attended 
strictly to his own business. 

Of course, there had been all sorts of 
rumors about him. One said that he 
had come from Philadelphia, where a 
newly-made grave held the fair form of 
his young wife. Another said that he 
had stolen a horse, or a bank, or some- 
thing. Several good people of the 
neighborhood took an interest in him 
when he came, and tried to find out 
why he had settled among them to 
lead the life of a recluse, but their re- 
searches and investigations were not 
rewarded with success. 

He told them he thought that he was 
able, perhaps, to manage his own affairs, 
including the little cabin and the 
twenty-acre lot, without assistance 
from outside sources. And so, for forty 
years, he had lived alone, without any 
apparent interest in anybody or any- 
thing and without any known object 
except mere existence. 

The oil excitement grew in intensity 



i 3 6 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



as the wells came nearer to the neigh- 
borhood in which John Richards lived ; 
but he paid no attention to it, except 
to refuse all offers to lease or buy his 
twenty-acre lot. 

One day a derrick was erected on the 
edge of a lot adjoining his, and pretty 
soon the " bird of the walking-beam/* 
so familiar to oil operators, began to 
sing its monotonous song. As the drill 
went down the excitement went up, for 
only a short distance away men who, a 
year before, were not worth a dollar, 
now had an income of fifty or a hun- 
dred dollars a day. 

The strata were carefully examined, 
and a log-book of the well was kept 
by a geologist — Prof. W. — who had 
located the well, and who was ex- 
pecting it to extend the territory. At 
last the third sand was reached, and 
the well was "shot." It proved to 
be a geniune " gusher," making 
seven hundred barrels in twenty-four 
hours. 



THE STORY OF AN OIL STRIKE. \T>1 

Once more the principal operator 
visited John Richards. This time he 
offered him twenty thousand dollars 
for his twenty acres. Still he refused, 
and everybody said he was an old 
f6ol. 

The chief oil magnate of the field, 
the one who had tried so hard to buy 
out old man Richards, was Fleming R. 
McDonald, known as Col. McDonald, 
probably because he had been chief 
marshal of a political parade in his 
native town during the Hayes -Tilden 
campaign. Many an innocent man 
is given a military title for a less offense, 
and compelled by a pitiless public to 
wear it through life like a millstone 
about his neck. 

Col. McDonald had come out to 
the oil field from New York state, and 
had brought his family of three daugh- 
ters with him. He had been very for- 
tunate and had made a good deal of 
money. Like all oil men, he lived 
like a king, and his daughters like the 



1^8 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

daughters of a king, with their horses 
and carriages and their guests from the 
city for weeks at a time. 

Col. McDonald had promised his 
daughters that if they would come out 
and make him a home while he made a 
fortune, they should have everything 
that money could buy, and he kept his 
word. 

His ambition was to get control of 
the entire field, and, enraged at Rich- 
ards' refusal to sell or lease his lot, 
which was in the very heart of the 
productive territory, he determined to 
drive the old man out. He had not 
been accustomed to being refused, and 
he was not going to allow a crazy old 
hermit to stand in his way now in the 
day of his prosperity. 

He threatened him and cursed him ; 
he hired boys to stone his cabin by 
night and taunt him by day with being 
a fool for not leasing or selling his 
land. He turned the course of a stream, 
so that it would run over the old man's 



THE STORY OF AX OIL STRIKE. 



J 39 



lot and destroy his garden. He per- 
mitted a great pool of stagnant water 
to stand and grow green and fester in 
the sun on his own land not five rods 
from the hermit's cabin. 

It was said, and generally believed, 
that he even offered a big reward to 
anyone who would fasten the door on 
the outside and set fire to the cabin 
while the old man was asleep, but there 
was none fiendish enough to take his 
gold for the old man's blood. 

Finding that by none of these means 
could he drive the hermit away, he 
hired a pettifogging lawyer to get up 
papers showing that Richards had 
never obtained a clear title to the land, 
and that it really belonged to the 
survey which McDonald had bought. 
The papers were prepared, and the oil 
king at last felt sure of getting posses- 
sion of the coveted prize, but fortu- 
nately an honest court saw through 
the scheme and refused to be a party 
to it. 



140 



IX THE VIRGINIAS. 



At last, after the most desperate 
efforts had all failed, McDonald gave 
up hope of getting possession of the 
old man's land while its owner lived, 
but his chagrin and anger showed them- 
selves in a constant persecution of 
Richards, hoping the while that the 
old man would not live much longer to 
be in his way. 

But this oil field was like all others, 
and by-and-by the collapse came. After 
the excitement began to cool off, and 
people began to get a business breath, 
it was found that while there had been 
a great many productive wells, there 
were a great many more dry holes, and 
that, for the past year or two, Col. 
McDonald had been investing almost 
exclusively in the latter. 

Becoming desperate, he began "wild- 
catting," that is, putting down wells in 
territory far from any producing wells, 
and the more money he lost the more 
reckless and desperate he became, until 
he was financially ruined. 



THE STORY OF AN OIL STRIKE, 



I 4 I 



An old habit of drink had been in- 
dulged, and, when ruin came, he was 
not in condition to meet it bravely; but 
he succeeded in keeping his daughters 
in ignorance of his losses until one 
morning he was found in the stables 
among his horses with a bullet hole in 
his head and a revolver lying by his 
right hand. 

Broken-hearted, in poverty, and vir- 
tually alone in the 'world, fallen from 
luxury to pinching penury, crushed to 
the earth by their fathers awful death, 
the daughters of the late oil king saw 
all of their possessions sold until they 
had left to them only the grave of a 
suicide father. 

And John Richards, what had he to 
do with all this? Nothing, except that 
he surprised everybody one day, soon 
after the true condition of the late 
Col. McDonald's affairs was known, 
by going to a driller and contracting 
for the immediate drilling of a well on 
his twenty-acre lot. He had caught 



142 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



the oil fever after everybody else had 
had it, and everybody said : " I told 
you so. I knew he'd come to it at 
last. But what an old fool he was for 
not taking that twenty thousand dol- 
lars which Col. McDonald offered 
him. I suppose the old miser has 
enough money stuck away somewhere 
to sink a dozen wells. ,, 

But John Richards heard none of 
this, and would not have cared if he 
had heard it. His thoughts were en- 
tirely taken up with his well. He took 
more interest in it than he had shown in 
anything before for forty years. Every 
day the old man, with his long white 
hair, could be seen watching the prog- 
ress of the bit as it bored its way into 
the earth. He even became com- 
municative, and, as there began to 
appear favorable signs of the right 
kind and quantity of sand, his face 
would light up and he would hob- 
ble around and talk about his good 
luck. 



THE STORY OF AX OIL STRIKE. 



H3 



When the oil sand was pierced, and 
the oil spouted over the derrick, he 
fairly danced for joy, and his old 
wrinkled face seemed to lose its wrinkles 
and to beam with delight. 

It proved to be the best well in the 
county, and before sundown the old 
man was offered once more a big sum 
of money for his little patch of ground. 
But he replied: "Come around in the 
morning." 

The next day the men who had 
made him the offer went to his cabin, 
but it was empty. A note, written 
with a trembling hand, was found lying 
on the bare table in the corner. It 
read : 

" I am going away and will not return. Look 
under the last plank in the floor. 

John Richards." 

They lifted the loose board, and, in 
an old tin box, they found a piece of 
paper, the last will and testament, 
properly witnessed, of John Richards, 



i 4 4 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



written with his own hand an hour 
after he had struck the big well. 

The old man had bequeathed his 
twenty-acre lot to the penniless daugh- 
ters of his old enemy and persecutor. 




A MAIDEN OF THE HILLS. 



H5 



A MAIDEN OF THE HILLS 




It was the proudest day of her life 

— and the saddest. 

He was to be grad- 
uated that day at the 
University, and she 
had neither gown 
nor gloves to wear. 

He was her brother. 

It had taken every dollar that he 
could earn, that his sacrificing sister 
could save, and that the father and 
mother could get together, to put him 
through college. 

The day he was graduated the 
father, the mother, and the sister were 
not there. The father had said: 

"Go, daughter, I will try to find 
money to pay your fare." 

But she had replied: "No; I can- 
not look fine like the sisters of his 



10 



4 6 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



classmates. I will not go and disgrace 
him." 

And she stayed at home, and her tears 
were sweet with sacrifice. 

[That day a great lady wept bitter 
tears of disappointment, over a gown 
for which she had paid $500, because 
the train was not long enough.] 

II. 

The next summer her brother went 
home to spend a week, and took wi'th 
him a classmate. They had been em- 
ployed together in a surveying corps. 

The week soon became a month — 
two months. 

His friend was handsome, thought- 
less, dashing. 

When he went away he said to her: 

"These little flirtations are forgotten 
in a week. Good-bye." 

And the heart of this maiden of the 
hills — ah, me! 

[That day a great lady cast aside, as 
a trifle, a heart that had been laid at 
her feet.] 



THE ARTIST'S STORY. 



147 



THE ARTIST'S STORY 

"Give me a subject for a picture and 
I will give you a subject for a story," 
said Feemer to me one night as we sat 
with our feet on my writing table, and 
filled the room with smoke. 

Feemer was a young fellow who had 
gone to Italy from somewhere in Vir- 
ginia, Page county, I think, and, after 
three years of hard 
work in Florence 
and a few months 
in Paris, had opened 
a studio in Cincin- 
nati. He had inher- 
i t e d considerable 
artistic instinct and talent from his 
father, who was a sculptor of wide rep- 
utation, and whose beautiful marbles 
adorn many public and private 




148 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



galleries. Young Feemer wanted to 
become a great painter, and he was 
modest enough to admit that several 
years might intervene before he could 
lay claim to such distinction. 

"Paint me a picture of the prettiest 
girl in the world," I replied banter- 
ingly to his proposition. 

He got up, walked slowly back and 
forth across the room two or three 
times, and said: 

"I can't do it, but I'll try; and some 
day I'll give you a subject for a story." 

I forgot all about the incident until 
three or four months afterwards, when 
I received a little portrait with Harry 
Feemer's familiar signature in the 
corner, accompanied by a note, which 
said, simply: "This is the best that I 
can do." 

The portrait was that of a girl, cer- 
tainly not over eighteen or nineteen 
years of age, with wonderful brown 
eyes and russet hair. As a bit of art 
it was so far superior to anything 



THE ARTIST'S STORY. 



I 49 




Feemer had done before, that I at first 
doubted if he had painted it, but upon 
reflection, I knew 
that he was too hon- 
est to try to deceive, 
and so I attributed 
the excellence of the 
work to the inspira- 
tion of the subject. 
I liked it and told 
him so, but he would not talk about it. 

Shortly afterwards I went East, and 
Feemer and I lost sight of each other. 
That was several years ago. 

Last week I threw my work into the 
corner and ran down into the beautiful 
valley about Luray for a vacation of 
ten days. Foolish are they who wear 
themselves out pretending to seek rest 
at the crowded seashore places, when 
a peace that passeth understanding and 
a joy that may not be told of in books, 
await the tired soul that, led by some 
good spirit, wanders into the beautiful 
country of the Shenandoah and the 



*5° 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



valley of Luray. In these autumn 
days the beggar here is richer than the 
Fifth avenue plutocrat. The old 
worm fences wind and struggle up the 
hillside, broken here and there — wind- 
ing and struggling and broken, but 
still climbing, like life itself. And 
these old silent lanes that invite to 
wander on and forget the office and 
the shop. And these cool caves in the 
limestone hills — caverns more beauti- 
ful than the palace of a king, resting 
places in the bosom of old mother 
earth. 

To this peaceful spot I came, as I 
had often come before, and if the busy 
world still went on its way, I neither 
knew nor cared. 

One day I was invited to join a 
party to visit the Luray cavern, and 
gladly went, although I had often wan- 
dered through its marvelous halls and 
pillared chambers. In the party was a 
young lady, whose name I did not 
learn at first, but who I knew was a 



THE ARTIST'S STORY. i^i 

resident of the neighborhood. I was 
sure that I had seen her before; cer- 
tainly I could not be mistaken; and 
my curiosity soon found me a way to 
a conversation with her. 

"I used to know a young fellow from 
this vicinity/' I said, "by the name of 
Feemer — Harry Feemer — an artist" — 

But I did not finish the sentence, for 
I was as much surprised at what I had 
discovered, as she had been at what I 
had said. This young woman, whom 
I was so sure I had seen before, was 
the original of the little portrait which 
Harry Feemer had painted for me 
many years before in Cincinnati, and 
had said in sending it to me: "This is 
the best that I can do." There were 
the same wonderful brown eyes and 
russet hair. 

She seemed greatly disturbed, and I 
saw that I had blundered, but she said: 

"Yes, he used to live here, but went 
away several years ago, and has never 
been back but once or twice." 






J 5 2 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



a Do you know where he is now?" 
I ventured to ask. 

"I — I — , pardon me," she said, turn- 
ing her face from me, and the very 
heighth and depth of sorrow seemed to 
me to be measured in that "pardon me." 

I had become much interested by 
this time, for I was anxious to know 
what had become of my old friend, and 
was determined to work out this 
mystery. 

That afternoon, while strolling up 
the mountain with an old friend, I 
said to him: "Tell me about Harry 
Feemer. You certainly know what 
has become of him." 

"If you will walk with me up this 
old turnpike leading from Rappahan- 
nock to the Luray valley, I will tell 
you." 

We walked on slowly, and I waited 
for my friend to begin, but he was 
silent. On and on we tramped up the 
old pike on the side of the Blue Ridge. 
At last he said: 



THE ARTIST'S STORY. 



J 53 



"Harry was a noble fellow, and I 
think he had great ability. I am sure 
no artist was ever truer to his ideal. 
Poor fellow !" 

"Yes," I said, impatiently, "but where 
is he? What has become of him?" 

"It's a peculiar story. Listen: You 
remember the young lady to whom 
you were talking about him this morn- 
ing in our cave party. Well, he wor- 
shipped that girl. He cared for only 
two things in the world: that girl and 
his art, and a good deal of his painting 
consisted of portraits of her. His 
studio was full of her pictures, little 
and big. You knew him in Cincinnati, 
I believe. Well, after staying there a 
year or two, he returned to Paris to 
continue his studies, and, of course, he 
stopped here a little while to see his 
relatives and old friends before sailing. 
In his Paris studio his walls and easels 
were filled with portraits of his Vir- 
ginia sweetheart. One day a fellow 
student came in, and, seeing so many 



*54 



IN THE VIRGINIAS, 




portraits of the same person, inquired 
who was the original. Feemer replied, 
'The prettiest girl in the world.' 

"The other student, who was a 
Frenchman named Ribot, shrugged 
his shoulders and said sneeringly: 

" 'Where did you pick up your prize 
beauty? Some little grisette, I sup- 
pose, who needs all the paint you have 
given her. I wonder if she would come 
to my atelier! 

"Ribot had hardly finished when 
Feemer knocked him down. 

" 'Oh, you want to fight for your 
model, do you ! Well, you must fight 
like a gentleman/ hissed Ribot. 

"The next morning at sunrise there 
was a duel in the Bois de Boulogne. 
Before going to the field, Feemer 
wrote home to her, at whom the insult 
had been thrown by the thoughtless 
Frenchman, telling her that for noth- 
ing else in the world would he fight a 
duel, but that he could never bear to 
look upon her picture again, if he did 



THE ARTIST'S STORY. 



*55 



not resent the insult to it and to 
her. 

"The duel took place next day," 
continued my friend as we crossed 
over from the turnpike into a rough- 
stone enclosure, on the very summit 
of the Blue Ridge, "and here he lies, 
and he would rather be here than 
alive with that insult to her picture 
unavenged." 

The mountain winds stole out from 
the forest and crept among the tall 
grave-grass, then howled down the 
hillside and away, as I stood by 
Feemer's grave and recalled the night 
many years ago, when he promised to 
give me a subject for a story. 

He had kept his word. 



i56 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



IN THE RUE ROYALE 



When you step across Canal street 
in New Orleans you cross over from 
America t o Southern 
Europe. A 1 1 rawness 
and rush are left on the 
other side of the Clay 
statue. The old Creole 
quarter — there is nothing 
like it in any other Amer- 
ican city, and its most 
picturesque street is the 
Rue Royale. From Conti street to 
Esplanade it is the delight of the 
painter, the poet, the romancer, and 
collector of rare old odds and ends. 
He who has taken time to let his 
spirit loaf and laze in true companion- 
ship with the soul of the place can 
never quite forget it. 




IN THE RUE ROYALE. 



157 



The Rue Royale — I was its devoted 
lover for two weeks, and the old flame 
comes back again now and then like a 
breath from the rose-hidden gallery of 
la belle Creole. 

The March mornings were balmy 
and beautiful, and a romance seemed to 
be woven about every cypress-covered 
dormer window and every little wrought- 
iron gallery. The ghosts of Madame 
Delicieuse and Sieur George haunted 
the place, and memories of the good 
Pere Antoine lingered in the air. Still 
"like an aged beggar fallen asleep/' the 
residence of Madame Delphine squatted 
down beside the banquette, and from 
the site of the old Cafes des Refugies 
came a chanson creole as plaintive as the 
story of Tite Poulette, and as sweet as 
the song of the mocking bird that 
swung itself in the top of a date palm 
in a courtyard near the Rue Saint 
Pierre. 

Every day T dropped into a dingy 
old bookstore with crumbling walls 



i53 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 




of stuccoed brick, one-storied and 
musty. 

The only cheery thing about the 
place was a bit of chansonette that 
came floating in from the lips of a girl 
hid behind the vines on the gallery 
across the narrow street. 

Every day I found an old man, 

gray and wrinkled, sitting like a 

mourner in this burial place of 

books holding an old volume in 

his lap. He handled it as gently 

and as lovingly as if it were the 

most fragile thing in the world. I 

noticed that he never seemed to be 

reading, although he slowly turned the 

leaves, and every touch was a caress. 

He was blind. 

The keeper of the store told me that 
this old man with the sightless eyes 
and gray beard had come to his place 
every day for years, stayed an hour, and 
then had gone out without saying a 
word, and felt his way with his stick 
down the street. 



IN THE RUE ROYALE. Kq 

I noticed how the old man's face 
lighted up as he took the same book 
down from the shelf every day, and how, 
each day, when he put it back in its 
place, he seemed to give it a farewell 
caress. 

The keeper of the store, after I 
had purchased " Souvenirs D'Amer- 
ique et de France, Par Une Creole," 
and Charles Gayarre's " Louisiana, " 
to put him in a good humor, told 
me this story of the old man and the 
book : 

" He came to New Orleans from the 
province of Savoie, France, when a 
young man and became a college pro- 
fessor. He was a great student. Young, 
brilliant, and ambitious, he gave himself 
up entirely to his books. The result 
was that he not only lost his eyesight 
but also impaired his mind. He was 
compelled to give up his place in the 
college. His library and furniture were 
sold a year or two later by his landlord, 
but some of his old friends have seen 



l60 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

that he has attention and enough to 
live on. 

" One day directly after the landlord 
had sold his books he came into my 
place in the most excited manner, and, 
with an expression on his face of 
mingled hope and despair, asked me if 
I had seen his sweetheart. I did not 
know what he meant, but tried to calm 
him. He went to the shelves and run 
his hand over the books. At last in 
delight he exclaimed, ! Here it is! Here 
it is!' and, taking down the book, he 
kissed it again and again and pressed it 
to his heart as tears of joy filled his 
sightless eyes. The book was one, as I 
afterwards learned, which had belonged 
to him, and the same which you have 
seen him hold in his lap every day. 

" I told him to take it home with him 
and keep it, but he refused, and no 
amount of persuasion on my part could 
induce him to take it. From that hour 
to this he has come here every day and 
spent an hour caressing that old book, 




IN THE RUE ROYALE. jgj 

which in his madness he calls his sweet- 
heart. No lover could be more con- 
stant, none more de- 
voted, none more ten- 
der. If I were to sell 
that book it would 
break his heart. Only 
yesterday I asked him 
again if he did not^ 
want to take it home 
with him, and he said: 'It would be 
lonesome there. I must not be selfish 
and take it from its companions. I 
must wait/ 

"And so he waits. But he is a tot- 
tering shadow ; he will not have long to 
wait, and, when they lay him away out 
yonder in the old St. Louis Cemetery, 
I shall see that his hands are crossed on 
that old book. ,, 

What is the name of the book? I 
inquired. 

" It is Haslam's Observations on Mad- 
ness and Melancholy." 



ii 



162 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



MARTHA 

"Tell me a tale, heroic and sublime, 

Of love and life and fields where heroes fell — 
A tale full fit for this stupendous time, 
That I may it to future ages tell." 

Thus spoke I once to one who came from o'er 
The ragged hills and sat beside my door. 

"If thou wilt go with me," he said, "I'll lead thee 
where 
Life's greatest tragedy has grown so old 
It seems as common as the common air — 
So wonted that none thinks it need be told." 

And far across the hills he led away, 

And all the sky and all the fields were gray. 

At length he stopped beside a cabin door, 
Amid the rocks and hills of barren clay, 

Where children crept upon the naked floor 

And women toiled like slaves through all the 
day. 

" Behold," he said, "the story — writ in tears, 
And starved and dwarfed lives through years and 
years!" 



MARTHA. 



l6 3 



There is nothing whatever of interest 
in the following story, because Martha 
was only a poor girl of the hills, and 
never had either good society or a good 
gown. 

Her home — you have seen it often if 
you have taken time to look as you fol- 
lowed the covey of Virginia quail — was 
between two hills where nature had 
spilt an unusual quantity of 
sunshine, and where all sorts 
of wild flowers came up and 
blossomed, because so few 
human beings were there 
to make them afraid. They 
did not know, perhaps, that 
Martha was only a poor 
mountain girl, or they might have 
shunned her society ; as it was, they 
knew no better than to love her, and 
she loved them in return, even to the 
tiniest bud of them. 

She came up and grew in the sun as 
they did ; toiled between the corn rows, 
bound the wheat sheaves, and raked the 




164 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



hay on the hillside when the sun was 
blistering. 

Necessity: This is the word that is 
written on every page of the life of the 
hills. 

She had heard twice or thrice, far, 
far away, an echo like that of music and 
laughter and the tripping of slippered 
feet, and she had seen twice or thrice, 
far, far away, faint gleams from the 
windows of houses where there were 
the gifts of luxury — she had heard and 
seen these things in her dreams as she 
lay with her face to the open window 
and the stars. For even a poor girl of 
the hills may dream when the shadows 
fall, so she but toil while the daylight 
last. 

The little field where they planted 
and ploughed and harvested the corn — 
you have seen her there as you rode 
by to the Springs, and you have noticed 
how consecration to duty can beautify 
everything it touches. But you did 
not have time to stop at the little 



MARTHA. 



165 



house which Martha called her home. 
Perhaps you did not care to ; you were 
in a hurry to get on to the Springs to 
boil out the rheumatism and gout 
which high living had planted in your 
system. Martha and the rest of the 
family — there were nine or ten of them 
— had no need to go to the Springs. 
The evil effects of high living did not 
trouble them. Even the barren life of 
the hills has its compensations. 

One day an old man with a gray 
beard and a high hat, who was devot- 
ing his life to what he called a ministry 
of education, went that way and saw 
the girl's bright face in the berry field 
and gave her two or three books, the 
first she had ever had except an old 
speller and a reader or two that had 
done service for the whole family. 

She did not return home that day 
until dark. Her bucket was only half 
filled, and her father scolded her for 
wasting her time. But it was one of 
the great events in Martha's life, for 



l66 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

things are great or small only by com- 
parison. 

Another great event was when she 
made a visit of four days with some 
cousins across the big hill a few miles 
away. The fixing up of an old hat, 
the making of a new calico dress espe- 
cially for the occasion, the putting on 
of a bit of bright new ribbon — these 
things were discussed in the family 
circle for days before the visit. 

Of course, it was very wrong for her 
to be so much interested in her appear- 
ance. Such things should be left to 
fine ladies, but there was no one to tell 
her all this. She may even have dared 
to think the bit of bright ribbon quite 
becoming, though certainly she had no 
right to think so, being, as I have said, 
only a poor, ignorant girl of the hills. 
It was doubtless that touch of nature 
which makes all femininity kin, though 
they will not all admit the kinship. 

At her cousin's house she met two 
young men who were spending a fort- 



MARTHA. 



167 



night hunting in that neighborhood, 
and one of them, Arthur Shore, was 
much attracted by her simple beauty. 
Being far from home, he thought it 
entirely safe to say sweet things to her, 
and, as he was on a hunting expedition, 
he was quite willing to capture any 
game in his power. She was no more 
to him than a covey of partridges or a 
fine young deer, but it was an easy 
matter to make her believe otherwise. 

After her return home, he and his 
companion crossed the hill also and 
soon made a friend of her father, who 
was himself a lover of a gun and a dog, 
and who acted as their guide during the 
remainder of their stay in the moun- 
tains. 

Martha believed the words of the 
young hunter; he was so frank and gal- 
lant, and handsome, so unlike the 
country lads whom she had met at the 
singing schools and spelling bees, and, 
when he went away, she thought it no 
harm to give him the kiss he asked for, 



l68 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

for had he not told her that he would 
return the next fall, when she was to 
be his wife and go away with him to a 
home such as she had dreamed of as 
she lay with her face to the open window 
and the stars ? 

Then there were great preparations 
in that simple home for the wedding 
which was to take place in the fall. 
Martha set to work at once to fit herself 
as far as possible for the new sphere in 
which she was to live. She borrowed 
such books as the neighborhood af- 
forded and read them with loving eager- 
ness — a " Model Letter Writer/* an 
old square leather-bound copy of 
"Scottish Chiefs/' Pinneo's grammar, 
and a few others. 

Two or three letters were received 
from Shore, in one of which he said 
that he was very busy in the office and 
that she must not expect to hear from 
him very often. She answered them as 
best she could, bestowing upon her let- 
ters infinite care, following the forms in 



MARTHA. 



169 



the " Model Letter Writer," misspelling 
half the words, and writing the address 
diagonally across the envelope in blue 
ink to make it look as pretty as pos- 
sible. When his letters stopped she did 
not lose faith in him for a moment, but 
felt sure that he would come soon him- 
self, and then the toiling in the fields 
would end. 

That summer was the one which the 
people over at the Springs still speak of 
with horror. It was the summer of the 
black diptheria — you have heard them 
tell of it over and over, and you have 
always been thankful that chance or 
Providence led you that year to the 
White Mountains instead of to the 
Virginia Springs where you had gone 
every summer before. Those who could 
get away did so as fast as the old rickety 
stage-coach could carry them, but many 
were left behind, some to die the awful 
death. 

Nurses could not be found, and 
Death, who fears the white cap and 



170 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



hushed step of a faithful nurse more than 
a dozen doctors, held his awful carnival 
with none to dispute his reign. The 
country round about was in a panic, 
and no one would go near the scene of 
death — none but Martha. As soon as 
she learned that everybody else was 
afraid to go she started. No entreaties 
or commands could prevent her. 

When she arrived at the Springs 
hotel she was directed to go at once to 
one of the little white private cottages 
adjoining the main building, where a 
lady, the wife of a man from Baltimore, 
was thought to be dying. She went 
without hesitation, and felt no fear. 
Softly opening the door she saw lying 
on the bed a young woman in great 
agony, and by her side, heart broken, 
knelt her husband. 

He arose when she entered and turned 
towards her as one who appeals for hope 
and help when there is neither, and she 
saw before her Arthur Shore ! 

Neither spoke a word, and the agony 



MARTHA. 



171 



of the heart-broken husband as he stood 
there by the side of his dying wife was 
as nothing compared with the torture 
of the poor girl who bravely walked 
over to the bed, took the hand of the 
dying woman, and did everything in 
her power to relieve her sufferings. 
Such remedies as the girl had heard of 
were hastily tried, but the Angel of 
Death had made his mark on the door- 
post, and the sweet lady, who had never 
dreamed of her husband's perfidy, died 
with his kiss on her lips. 

Martha helped to prepare her for 
burial, and put a little bunch of flowers 
in her grave when they buried her out 
in the sandy earth under the clump of 
chestnut trees to the east of the Lover's 
Walk — you remember it — which winds 
that way from the Springs. 

As they turned again towards the 
empty little white cottage, Arthur said : 
" Can I ever be forgiven ? " "Ask of 
her in the grave. She has much more 
to forgive than I," was the only reply. 



172 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



When the contagion had died out, and 
there was nothing more that she could 
do, Martha returned to her home and 
took up her old life with no word of 
complaint, and next summer, as you go 
by in the old rickety stage-coach on 
your way to the famous old Springs, 
you will see her again among the corn 
rows as of old, but you will not know 
her, and she will not look up and smile 
and wave her hand to you as she used 
to do. 



THE COMPANIONS, 



J 73 



THE COMPANIONS 

In an old log house, among the Mo- 
nongahela hills, there once lived a little 
lame girl. She had no playmates, and 
her friends and companions were such 
as she might make of the inanimate 
objects of nature around her. She was 
too delicate to hunt the wild flowers in 
the spring woodlands or coast on the 
winter snows, and was forced to sit all 
day long at her window or in the narrow 
yard, and watch the shepherds of the 
sky lead home their flocks, and hear 
the winds make ardent love to the pines 
and the poplars far away. 

Every evening she threw a kiss from 
her small blue fingers to the departing 
sun, and every night she told her 
troubles to her confessor star, which 



i74 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



looked down upon her little bed under 
the clapboard roof. 

But her dearest companion was a 
great poplar tree, which stood alone on 
a high hill, a mile from the house. It 

was straight, gigan- 
tic, magnificent. The 
woodmen had left it 
there because they 
had not the heart 
to cut it down, and 
when the land was 
sold by its original 
owner, it was stated 
in the deed that the great poplar was 
not to be disturbed. In its branches the 
bald eagles had nested ever since long 
before the cabin was built in the valley 
below, and the hawks that stood still in 
the sky like ships on a becalmed sea, 
dropped anchor in its topmost branches. 
It lifted its arms to high heaven for 
benedictions on all the lands, and gave 
the petals of its big yellow blossoms as 
love tokens to the winds. 




THE COMPANIONS. 



175 



The child looked upon this tree with 
awe. She wondered what great secret 
it held in its Titanic breast; what mes- 
sages the winds and the birds carried to 
it from the oaks and beeches far away, 
and if it ever thought of her down 
there watching it for hours at a time. 
So much did its great strength and 
majesty impress the little invalid, that 
she lost all interest in the cloud-flocks 
of the skyey pastures, and no longer 
told her secrets to her starry confessor, 
but made the poplar her only com- 
panion and friend. ' 

By and by her awe mellowed into 
love, and she would implore her father 
to carry her to the hilltop, that she 
might lay her face against the tree's 
mighty trunk. He told her she was 
foolish, and that she must not think 
about it again, but she continued to 
weave fancy after fancy, and her 
strange love grew stronger every day. 

One night a terrific storm wrestled 
for hours with the giant of the hill, and 



176 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



the next morning the child saw that a 
limb had been torn from its side and 
was lying on the ground. She cried 
as though her heart would break, for 
the great scar seemed to her childish 
imagination a bleeding wound. She 
must go to the tree at once and tell it 
how sorry she was. They found her 
at its foot exhausted and weeping. 
She had never walked so far before and 
the exertion, together with the excite- 
ment and sorrow of her tender heart, 
made her ill for days, and, in her 
delirium, she would reach out her 
hands towards the old poplar, and ask 
if it was much hurt. 

Not long after this incident the land 
was sold again, and one of the first 
things the new owner did, was to fell 
the poplar for the purpose of rafting it 
with other logs and floating it down 
the river to Pittsburg. 

The little child knew nothing of the 
impending fate of her companion, until 
she saw two sturdy axemen approach it 



THE COMPANIONS. 



177 



one morning, look admiringly at its 
huge trunk, decide which way it ought 
to fall, and then begin chopping. 

In terror she started at once for the 
hill, which she climbed with great 
effort, but hoping only that she might 
not be too late to save her friend. She 
threw herself between the men and the 
tree, and commanded them not to 
touch it, for it belonged to her. But 
the men laughed at her commands, 
entreaties, and tears, and, in order to 
get rid of her, one of them carried her 
back to her home. 

They felled the poplar, 
and every blow they struck 
seemed to sink into the 
heart of the child. Her 
agony was pitiful, and 
there was great fear that 
she would lose her mind. 
But she grew calm, and, 
without saying a word, 
watched the men saw the 
trunk into logs of the proper length, 
12 




1^8 IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

hitch their oxen to them, and haul 
them down the hillside and away 
towards the river. 

The day that the last log was 
taken away, the child was missing. 
Search was made everywhere about the 
place, but she could not be found. 
Then the neighbors were summoned, 
and a systematic hunt was made. 

Little tracks were discovered in the 
broad, soft furrows made by the severed 
and prostrate trunk of her giant friend, 
as the oxen had dragged it to the 
river's edge. The searchers followed 
with anxious hearts and rapid steps, 
hoping and fearing. 

The footprints led to the river, and 
there they found the dead body of the 
child with her arms about her old com- 
panion, and her pallid face resting 
against its shaggy trunk. 



HAFED BEX HAFED. 



179 



HAFED BEN HAFED 

A LEGEND OF PERSIA 

It was in the reign of Malik Shah — 
may Allah rejoice his soul — 
that a mysterious rider, on a 
white horse, galloped across 
the salt sands from Naishapur 
in Khorasan to the tent of 
Hafed Ben Hafed. The 
stranger sat by the door of the 
tent, silent, till the sun went down. 
Then mounting his horse he said: 

" Hafed Ben Hafed, art thou content?" 

And he rode away like an arrow into 
the night. 

Hafed Ben Hafed sat in his tent and 
pondered the words of the mysterious 
messenger, till the morning broke. 
Then he said to himself: 

"No, I cannot be content until I 




l8o IN THE VIRGINIAS. 

shall have slain mine enemy and the 
enemy of my clan." 

And he arose and went into the 
mountains of Khorasan. When he 
returned to his tent there was one less 
enemy of Allah and his Prophet. 

Again the mysterious rider galloped 
across the salt sands from Naishapur 
and stopped by the door of Hafed Ben 
Hafed's tent till the sun went down. 
Then mounting his horse he said: 

"Hafed Ben Hafed, art thou content?" 

And he rode away like an arrow into 
the night. 

Hafed Ben Hafed sat in his tent and 
pondered the words of the mysterious 
messenger, till the morning broke. 
Then he said to himself: 

"No, I cannot be content until I 
shall have become the ruler of the 
province." 

And he arose and went towards the 
north and organized a band of soldiers. 
And when he returned to his tent he 
was accompanied by shoutings of 



HAFED BEN HAFED. 



181 



triumph. But he refused to give up 
his tent on the edge of the desert for a 
palace in the city. 

And he continued to rule over the 
province and became a great favorite 
with Malik Shah. 

Again the mysterious rider came 
across the salt sands and sat beside 
Hafed Ben Hafed's door till the sun 
went down. Then mounting his horse 
he said: 

"Hafed Ben Hafed, art thou content ?" 

And he rode away like an arrow into 
the night. 

Hafed Ben Hafed 
sat in his tent and 
pondered the words 
of the mysterious 
messenger, till the 
morning broke. Then 
he said to himself: 

"No, I cannot be 
content until I shall 
have founded a dynasty and planted 
a throne for my descendants/' 




l82 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



Then he arose and went to Teheran. 
And there began the bloodiest chapter 
in Persia's history, when the thirsty 
desert drank blood like water, when all 
the roses that bloomed in the valley 
were red like blood, and when, for the 
space of a year, there was not heard the 
note of a nightingale from the valley of 
the Tigris, east to CabooL 

But when the white roses began to 
bloom again, and the nightingales to 
sing in the gardens of 
Persepolis, the people 
saluted H a f e d Ben 
Hafed as ruler and 
king. 

But he continued to 
live in his tent by the 
edge of the salt desert, 
with the door opening 
towards the rising sun. 
Again the myste- 
rious rider galloped 
across the salt sands 
from Naishapur, and sat before the 




HAFED BEN HAFED. 



183 



door of Hafed Ben Hafed till the sun 
went down. Then mounting his horse 
he said: 

"Hafed Ben Hafed, art thou content?" 

And he rode away like an arrow into 
the night. 

Hafed Ben Hafed sat in his tent and 
pondered the words of the mysterious 
messenger, till the morning broke. 

Then he arose and went to the door 
of his tent, and there he found a poor 
child of the desert, son of the en- 
emy of his youth, whom he had 
slain with all his clan, in the 
mountains of Khorasan. 

Hafed Ben Hafed took the child 
into his tent and gave him dates 
and pomegranates and choice 
wine, and said unto him: 

"Thou son of mine ancient enemy, 
thou shalt be in future mine own son." 

And the child of the desert went and 
fetched a white rose and gave it to his 
benefactor. And Hafed Ben Hafed 
said: 




184 



IN THE VIRGINIAS. 



"Now I am content. For every 
drop of blood that I have shed, there 
shall be planted a white rose tree 
throughout the land of my kingdom/' 

And from that day Persia has been 
called the land of the white rose and 
the nightingale. 

And the mysterious rider from across 
the salt sands stopped no more before 
the door of Hafed Ben Hafed's tent. 




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